June 8, 2017 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:40:48
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Three, two, one. | |
| Yes. | ||
| Are we live? | ||
| Not yet. | ||
|
unidentified
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Pause. | |
| Hold. | ||
| YouTube. | ||
| Some sort of a struggle. | ||
| Yeah, we're live. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| How are you? | ||
| You're a Wheeler Walker Jr. fan, I see? | ||
| Maybe I will be. | ||
| You never heard of him before? | ||
| I hadn't. | ||
| I confess. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| So first of all, thank you. | ||
| Thanks for doing this. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Yeah, no problem. | ||
| What is it like? | ||
| I mean, I guess this is the best way to get this started. | ||
| What is it like being a person that grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church? | ||
| For a person on the outside, for me, when I think of that, I think of this crazy, hateful, angry environment filled with really mean people that say horrible things about gay people and all sorts of other folks. | ||
| But I meet you and you're super nice. | ||
| You seem so normal. | ||
| That is the conundrum. | ||
| So, I mean, a lot of the things, the words that you just used to describe the church, that's definitely not how I experienced it growing up, for the most part. | ||
| I mean, my family, outside of when they're not on the picket line, they're, I mean, incredibly kind and gentle and compassionate. | ||
| And I think the biggest misconception about the church is that they're motivated by hatred. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| In their eyes, it's the definition of loving. | ||
| What we thought we were doing was loving our neighbor. | ||
| So the first time that phrase appears in the Bible, it's in the context of when you see your neighbor sinning, you have to rebuke him, not just like watch him wander off on this way to hell. | ||
| So that was how we saw it. | ||
| We thought we were warning people and giving them the only hopeful message that could save them from eternity and hell. | ||
| Was there ever any dissent amongst the people that were in the church about, like, how the message is being distributed? | ||
| Like, if you're holding up a sign that says, God hates fags, and a gay guy was being buried at a funeral, and you guys were there protesting with those signs. | ||
| Like, was there ever anyone inside the organization that was like, hey, this is not the way to do it. | ||
| These people are suffering and mourning. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| I mean, once my grandfather, he was the one who kind of developed that strategy. | ||
| He thought, so, you know, the examples are for funerals. | ||
| If somebody, if they're burying somebody, so a soldier, say, or a gay person, it's an example of the curses of God. | ||
| So God says, if you obey me, I'll bless you. | ||
| And if you disobey me, I'll curse you. | ||
| So why soldiers? | ||
| So several times in the scriptures, it's this connection between the sins of the nation and the punishments. | ||
| So for instance, in the book of Judges, it says, they chose new gods, then was war in their gates. | ||
| And then in the books of the Kings, it says, there fell down many slain because the war was of God. | ||
| And then in the book of Hosea, it says, they have deeply corrupted themselves. | ||
| Therefore, I will remember their iniquity, and I will visit their sins. | ||
| Though they bring up their children, yet will I bereave them. | ||
| There shall not be a man left. | ||
| So it's these threatenings, these warnings from God that if you disobey me, I'm going to curse you. | ||
| So we would go to these soldiers' funerals to warn the living, to say that if you don't want to be likewise punished, you have to repent. | ||
| You have to change your ways and obey God. | ||
| Now, people that are also hardcore Christians, that also follow the word of God very closely, but still would see like what you guys were doing at these funerals, holding up these signs, protesting where a soldier who supposedly gave his life for our freedom, right? | ||
| Supposedly they're over there fighting so that we could be safe here. | ||
| Yeah, you guys are out there with these signs. | ||
| Like, there had to be a lot of people that have like-minded views in Christianity, but still were furious at you people. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And from our perspective, we thought that they were substituting their righteousness for the righteousness of God. | ||
| So they were upset that we were out there giving this message that was 100% biblical from our point of view. | ||
| And God calls that compassion when he sends his servants with his message. | ||
| So we thought, even though they call themselves Christians, they're ignoring these vast swaths of the Bible that support what we were saying and how we were saying it. | ||
| So, I mean, there was definitely a lot of pushback from people on all sides, and especially from other Christians. | ||
| But we just thought, they're not really Christian because they're not following this like we understand it. | ||
| So you guys were pretty much solidified in your opinion. | ||
| It was a consensus. | ||
| It was like everybody thought you were doing the right thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, I mean, so that when the soldiers' funerals, when those protesting, it was in June of 2005 that we started protesting soldiers' funerals. | ||
| How was it brought up? | ||
| So my grandfather had been, so it's 2005, so the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, he'd been, you see these things on the news, and he was, I mean, the funerals, like what was going on at the funerals. | ||
| And he said, these aren't funerals. | ||
| These are patriotic pep rallies. | ||
| And they're saying all these things about God bless America. | ||
| Well, God isn't blessing America. | ||
| God is cursing America. | ||
| So we have to go and give a different message. | ||
| So that's how it came up initially. | ||
| So I went to my first soldiers funeral protest the following month in July of 2005. And before I went, so every time we would go to these things, I was protesting from the time I was five years old. | ||
| So when you go out to these protests, a lot of times there would be media there, people asking questions. | ||
| And I wasn't sure how I would answer it. | ||
| If somebody asked me, why are you at this funeral? | ||
| I wasn't sure how I would answer it. | ||
| So when I found out I was going, I thought, I need to understand this. | ||
| So I went to my mother and she brings forth those verses that I just quoted to you and several others. | ||
| We sat down as a family, as we did every night, to read the Bible and to talk about world events and the church's interpretation of these events in light of their understanding of the scriptures. | ||
| So, you know, she goes through and explains this, you know, very carefully. | ||
| And because her answers came from the Bible, the Bible. | ||
| That was my foundation was that the Bible is the infallible word of God and that it's true no matter what any human thinks and that we have a duty to obey it 100% no matter what I think or feel otherwise. | ||
| I have to bring my thoughts and opinions in line with this. | ||
| So even though I had a lot of trepidation at the beginning about going to those funerals, I very quickly acclimated to it, you know, as you do when in an environment like that, where everything depends on you falling into line. | ||
| Now, what was it like when you first did it? | ||
| Like, what was the reaction to other people, you know, other people's reaction to you? | ||
| So that very first one, it was in Omaha, Nebraska, and it was incredibly tense. | ||
| So there was a bunch of cops. | ||
| We always, every time we would go to protest somewhere, we would contact the police to make sure that there would be a police presence. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because people were tempted to, and did, you know, would come after us physically and try to assault us. | ||
| And again, this, it happened with some regularity. | ||
| So from the very earliest days of the protesting, we, you know, my mom and her generation had made this decision to, who I should say, many of them are lawyers. | ||
| So they would, you know, write letters from, you know, as attorneys saying, We're going to be coming. | ||
| We're going to be protesting in your city. | ||
| This is what we do. | ||
| We hold signs on public sidewalks. | ||
| We are not violent. | ||
| So explaining what our protests looked like. | ||
| And then saying, if you want to avoid this kind of violence that often happens, be there. | ||
| So this first one, how old were you in 2005? | ||
| I was 19. So you were a kid, you know, but a grown kid. | ||
| And, you know, you're with your parents and this is the first time you're protesting a veteran. | ||
| What was that experience like? | ||
| So I'm standing across the street from the church. | ||
| Like I said, it was very solemn, very quiet, which was not normal really for protests. | ||
| A lot of times we would be out there, you know, singing and chanting and making, it was a big public display. | ||
| But this was, like I said, incredibly tense. | ||
| Nobody was really talking. | ||
| nobody was really moving and you know the family was you know pulled up in a and I think it was in a limousine across the street and the family got out and and looked around and saw us and did they know you guys were gonna be there beforehand mm-hmm Because we always would publicize that. | ||
| We would send out news releases. | ||
| So they were aware that we were going to be there. | ||
| And there were a bunch of, I think there were Marines, like in dress blues, standing there. | ||
| And they looked incredibly angry and upset. | ||
| But like I said, it was like, it felt like at any moment, if something happened, that the whole situation could explode. | ||
| But again, so the cops, having the cops standing there. | ||
| So it was really tense. | ||
| What kind of things are they saying to you guys? | ||
| They weren't saying anything. | ||
| It's really unusual for protests like that. | ||
| A lot of times we would be exchanging. | ||
| We, of course, would be yelling about Bible verses and the hatred of God, and they would be talking about love and tolerance and how we're wrong and not Christian. | ||
| But at this one, it was very quiet. | ||
| It wasn't always like this, so pretty quickly, once we became acclimated to To those protests. | ||
| And also, have you heard of the Patriot Guard riders? | ||
| It was a group of motorcyclists who decided to, and they formed across the country, so in every state there was a group of these motorcyclists who, when they found out we were going to be protesting somewhere, they would go and, you know, rev their engines so that our words and songs and such wouldn't be heard by the family. | ||
| And they would, you know, hold American flags and try to block It's putting a buffer between us and the family. | ||
| So when that started to happen, it became almost like a game sometimes. | ||
| In hindsight, this makes me cringe. | ||
| But it became like this game of trying to show that we were going to get our message across no matter what any human being wanted, because we knew, we were so sure that this was what God wanted. | ||
| What made you leave? | ||
| A lot of things. | ||
| It started my very first sort of conscious doubts came from conversations on Twitter. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Something good got done through Twitter? | ||
| Yeah, lots of good things. | ||
| I also met my husband there. | ||
| Oh, there you go. | ||
| While I was still at the church. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh. | |
| It's kind of nuts. | ||
| Is he an atheist? | ||
| I don't know that he would use that word to describe himself. | ||
| Actually, I was just talking to Sam about this and I was like, when people, the problem with the word is when people, when you say atheist, people think jerk. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Well, so many people do. | ||
| So many people think that, like, oh, you're absolutely certain that there is no God. | ||
| And so it's a word that I hesitate to use to describe myself, too. | ||
| But I'm not a believer. | ||
| I don't even like to say I'm not a believer because I love people. | ||
| I believe in people and that there is so much hope for people and that we can... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Anyway, so... | ||
| So conversations that you had on Twitter did what, do you? | ||
| Like, what doors did they open in your mind? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I got on Twitter and it was like an extension of the picket line, right? | ||
| So we'd go out there with these picket signs and, you know, people would come up to us and ask us questions. | ||
| And so it was a constant conversation. | ||
| And so I got on Twitter to take that, you know, to... | ||
| To the internet to reach more people. | ||
| And so one of the first things I did when I got on Twitter was to attack this Jewish man named David Abbott Ball, who ran a blog called Jewlicious. | ||
| He was listed as the second most influential Jew on Twitter on this website. | ||
| Who's number one? | ||
| I actually can't remember. | ||
| Not memorable. | ||
| Not part of my story, I guess. | ||
| You can check it. | ||
| It's the JTA's list if you want to. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's okay. | |
| But anyway, so he was listed as number two. | ||
| And so... | ||
| He responded initially with sarcasm and hostility, but pretty quickly he sort of changed tactics and started, instead of mocking me, although he still did do that some too, he was asking questions about our picket signs. | ||
| And I started asking him questions about Jewish theology, because I wanted to better know how to counter it from the scriptures. | ||
| I was sure that they were wrong. | ||
| Jews killed Jesus and they reject him as the Messiah and so all of these things. | ||
| Right, so we're having this back and forth. | ||
| And this goes on for about a year. | ||
| And during that year, I actually met him twice. | ||
| I protested him twice. | ||
| So you went to his functions, or was he giving speeches? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Where was he? | ||
| In Long Beach, actually, at the Jewlicious Festival. | ||
| They had this Jewish cultural festival. | ||
| What a great name. | ||
| Yeah, it's great. | ||
| He's great. | ||
| So he was going to be there, and I went and I was protesting him. | ||
| And he came out to the picket line, and it was one of those very rowdy pickets. | ||
| There was a bunch of counter-protesters. | ||
| I don't know, guys dressed as like the Easter Bunny and Jesus and, you know, it actually got pretty violent. | ||
| It got violent. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| And the cops, I told you we called the cops, like the cops were just standing there watching people like actively assaulting us, like hitting us. | ||
| And so we're like walking around trying to, you know, to not be hit because we're not going to hit back. | ||
| Like I said, the church is very against violence. | ||
| Like they're not going to be violent to people. | ||
| Or defend themselves. | ||
| So I was actually really glad when David came out because he became like a buffer between me and the rest of the counter-protesters because everybody could tell that he was wearing his Jewish shirt and whatever. | ||
| Anyway, so the conversation continued there and then also had another protest six or seven months later. | ||
| And then It was not long after that second protest, we're talking again, and he was asking about one of our signs that said, death penalty for fags. | ||
| And, you know, of course, I'm reiterating why the church believes that, because in the book of Leviticus, God calls for the death penalty for gays. | ||
| And then in Romans 1, in the New Testament, Uh, it's reiterated says they that commit such things are worthy of death. | ||
| So, um, and so I'm telling David these things and he says, um, it's like, yeah, but didn't Jesus say, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. | ||
| And I said, well, we always said to that, which was, uh, we're not casting stones. | ||
| We're preaching words. | ||
| And he said, yeah, but you're advocating that the government cast stones. | ||
| And I remember, you know, this is all through Twitter. | ||
| So I see this message and I kind of gasped and I was like, I had never connected that Jesus there, of course he was talking about the death penalty, specifically about the death penalty, and we were advocating it. | ||
| And so I wasn't sure how to respond, but David kept going. | ||
| He said, and what about this member of your church who had a child out of wedlock? | ||
| And I said, what about it? | ||
| This is another point. | ||
| It was common knowledge. | ||
| People knew about this and would throw this in our face. | ||
| And we would say, the standard of God isn't sinlessness, it's repentance. | ||
| So she doesn't deserve that punishment because she repented. | ||
| She wasn't having premarital sex anymore and she knows that it's wrong and she changed her mind and she changed her conduct, which is what repentance is. | ||
| And he said, yeah, but she would have been killed if you had instituted the death penalty for that sin. | ||
| And it was the first time again that I connected that if you kill somebody, as soon as they sin, you lose the opportunity to repent and be forgiven. | ||
| And so, again, so I'm just sort of staring at my phone and, you know, in Topeka, Kansas, he's in Jerusalem. | ||
| And I really quickly ended the conversation. | ||
| I don't even remember quite how, but it was just sort of this, like, I didn't know how to handle this because... | ||
| Like I said, the church is full of lawyers. | ||
| They're very intelligent. | ||
| And their arguments and their theology, for the most part, is very well constructed and super consistent. | ||
| And so for there to be this hypocrisy, this contradiction, my brain felt like I was exploding. | ||
| So I went to a couple people in the church, including my mother. | ||
| And the response was, feel free to stop me at any time, by the way. | ||
| I feel like I'm still the best right here. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| So she reiterated the same verses that I had told David that supported our position, but she didn't address the contradiction. | ||
| And when I seemed unsatisfied with it, she said I was getting wrapped around an axle and just sort of, you know, push it aside. | ||
| And the response was so just to shut me down and then to move on to the next thing, which is a very human thing, right? | ||
| When somebody puts something in your face that It's this contradiction that you're not ready to deal with or that you can't... | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You compartmentalize, you kind of sort of push it aside and try not to... | ||
| So the way that I dealt with it was to stop holding the sign because I knew that if somebody asked me about it, I couldn't defend it because I didn't believe it. | ||
| But there was nothing else I could do at that point. | ||
| But the importance of that conversation, this is obviously just one small contradiction, one small inconsistency and a vast, you know, we still, I still believed that everybody outside the church was basically completely wrong and evil and or delusional. | ||
| And that the church was basically right, except this one point. | ||
| Did anybody ever feel that it was bad to use slurs? | ||
| Like to use some sort of insulting term for gay people instead of saying God hates gay people? | ||
| So at the very beginning, they did use the word gays. | ||
| Why did they change it? | ||
| Well, so my grandfather would say that gay is a misnomer. | ||
| These people aren't happy. | ||
| They're committing suicide and they're evil and abominable and they have no peace. | ||
| God has taken their peace. | ||
| They're not happy. | ||
| So gay is a misnomer. | ||
| And so the word fag, they say, like Amos, in the book of Amos, there's a It's translated firebrand there. | ||
| So my grandfather would say, the word fag is an elegant metaphor. | ||
| And it's gays, you know, fags are a bundle of sticks, right? | ||
| Used for kindling. | ||
| So gays are, they burn in their lust one toward another, and they fuel the fires of hell and the fires of God's wrath. | ||
| So it's an elegant metaphor, Gramps would say. | ||
| Do you know what the original metaphor was really supposed to be? | ||
| You mean from the Bible? | ||
| No, the word faggot. | ||
| Oh, no, actually. | ||
| Faggot means a bundle of wood, and they would use that expression to describe a woman, because a bundle of wood is burdensome. | ||
| Like carrying around a bundle of wood is very burdensome. | ||
| So when they would call a woman a faggot, they were saying that she was burdensome. | ||
| So when they would call a man a faggot, they would say that he is burdensome like a woman, like a bundle of wood, like a non-manly man that can't get work done, you know, along those lines. | ||
| And then it became used by people erroneously saying that it was about burning them. | ||
| And that they would burn gay people because they would burn faggots of wood. | ||
| That's not really the case. | ||
| It just sounds cool. | ||
| I actually had never heard that before. | ||
| See if you can find that, Jamie. | ||
| Google that. | ||
| The original term faggot meant bundle of wood and burdensome like a bundle of wood. | ||
| Think about carrying a bundle of wood. | ||
| Especially if you didn't have a truck. | ||
| It's a huge pain in the ass. | ||
| That's kind of what the source of it was. | ||
| Yeah, people use it wrong. | ||
| And the real problem is the people that use it wrong are like gay activists and they try to say how horrible that word is because it was used to represent how gay people were burnt. | ||
| But there's never been like a time in history where like there's a whole series of gay people that were like burnt. | ||
| You know, it's just like they drowned witches and things were done like real specifically, but it's never been like a thing. | ||
| What do we got here? | ||
| The word faggot has been used in English since the late 16th century is an abusive term for women, particularly old women. | ||
| A reference to homosexual sexuality may derive from this. | ||
| Why does it have to be so weird? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, I can read it like that. | ||
| Blah, blah, blah. | ||
| So there it is. | ||
| An alternative possibility is that the word connected with the practice of fagging in British private schools in which younger boys performed potentially sexual duties for older boys, although the word faggot was never used in this context. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| But the big one means the bundle of wood. | ||
| The bundle of sticks. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| What's that, Jamie? | ||
| What do you got? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Something awkward to be carried. | |
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| Burdensome. | ||
| So that's where it comes from. | ||
| It really didn't have anything to do with burning people. | ||
| But they'll repeat it to make a big point, like a big dramatic point. | ||
| But it's, you know, it's melodramatic. | ||
| You would think I would know this, given our respective histories, but I literally have never heard this in my life. | ||
| Yeah, it's an important distinction for why people use that term. | ||
| Because it's really just that they're annoying. | ||
| I mean, it's really just, you know, they just think of some non-manly man who can't get things done, and he's probably crying all the time, and he's burdensome. | ||
| My experience of gay people since we left, which is obviously much more maybe reflective of reality, has not been that at all. | ||
| What has it been like? | ||
| Un-impossibly wonderful. | ||
| Don't overcompensate because you're getting out of this bad environment. | ||
| I'll take you down to Santa Monica Boulevard to some of the gayest spots on earth. | ||
| You'll see dudes with cut off shorts and you'll change your tune. | ||
| You'll be like, what are they doing? | ||
| Well, I mean, I'm not trying to paint everybody with one brush now either. | ||
| They've been amazing. | ||
| As soon as they start being attracted to men, something happens. | ||
| They become different than every other person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's not what I mean. | |
| They're just people, right? | ||
| Yes, sure. | ||
| So, I mean, right after we left... | ||
| At first I thought we have to hide from the past forever. | ||
| My sister and I, I should say, left together. | ||
| How old were you guys? | ||
| So I was 26. I was almost 27. Did you have a long conversation before you did it? | ||
| Many. | ||
| It was about four months between when I first talked to her about leaving. | ||
| So what was the first initial conversation and how did you gather up the courage to even sort of breach the subject? | ||
| It was really terrifying and awful because, I mean, I remember from the time I was very young, there's this passage in Deuteronomy that my mom would quote, and it's about, you know, if somebody, if your friend, somebody close to you, your relative, somebody comes up to you and says, let us go and serve other gods, like somebody secretly says to you those things, you have to stone them. | ||
| And you, the one that they came to, you're supposed to be the first one to, and my family's not stoning people. | ||
| What would they do, though, if it said it in the Bible and someone said, hey, we have to serve this golden cow? | ||
| So we also have, in the New Testament, it talks about rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God's the things that are God's. | ||
| So we also have to obey the law of man. | ||
| We have to obey the law, so we're not supposed to be just... | ||
| But the law of man supersedes the law of God? | ||
| We're supposed to be obedient to the laws of men. | ||
| But also, I mean, this is kind of a complicated, a little bit, a theology where it sort of undid a lot of the mosaic code that we didn't actually have to follow those things. | ||
| But honestly, I don't know. | ||
| I think it's the whole, I think it's like the death penalty for fags thing. | ||
| So like, if they still believe that that punishment is applicable, then we should be trying to convince the government, lobbying the government to Like with those signs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So that, it was, you know, my sister, if I went to her and said these things to her, she could easily have turned around and told my parents, not as a, it's a culture of tattletales, not out of bad intention, but because they believe that They're trying to help you. | ||
| They don't want you to go down a bad path. | ||
| I first thought of leaving on July 4th, and I was with my sister at the time, and when it first occurred to me that I might have to leave the church, or that the church might be wrong, I thought I had to leave that second, because if it even occurred to me that meant I didn't belong there, and that God was going to punish me, and that I just felt immediately So much guilt and like I was a betrayer. | ||
| But was all your social life connected still to the church? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And was this where, had you already known your husband by then? | ||
| I had, yeah. | ||
| So he corrupted you. | ||
| He was definitely part of it. | ||
| But it wasn't like that. | ||
| It's like the beginning. | ||
| So he was just another person on Twitter at first. | ||
| And it was a friendly conversation. | ||
| And this went over for the course of several months. | ||
| I don't know, eight months or so, seven or eight months. | ||
| Uh, and then, and it was never, there was never anything, you know, about feelings or, you know, relationships or all that stuff is totally forbidden. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Booty pictures? | |
| No, nothing like that. | ||
| Like, not even, like, not even anything, like, nothing. | ||
| Like, it's just that I, my mind didn't work that way. | ||
| There is, there can be no relationship like that with outsiders. | ||
| But... | ||
| Outsiders? | ||
| Outsiders, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So, you know, I actually thought I was never going to get married because most of the people in the church, about 80% or so of the people in the church, there's only 80 people or so anyway, were my immediate and extended family. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| So I thought, there's no way that I'm just not going to get married. | ||
| So you just accepted that? | ||
| It wasn't like an easy thing at first, but it was just... | ||
| It was just the facts on the ground. | ||
| So the facts on the ground were you had to date someone inside the church. | ||
| There was only 80 people in the church. | ||
| They're all your family. | ||
| You can't date your family. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wow. | ||
| I should say, there were a couple of people my age, and they had just joined the church. | ||
| But I had no interest in any of them. | ||
| Oh no. | ||
| Slim pickings and not... | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But yeah, it was kind of strange. | ||
| So I actually had a dream about meeting... | ||
| I should say also my husband. | ||
| At the time, I didn't know... | ||
| He was totally anonymous on Twitter. | ||
| It's just his words. | ||
| I didn't know what he looked like. | ||
| I didn't know his name or where he lived or anything about him. | ||
| Uh, except, except these words. | ||
| Um, and he was, uh, he was just curious and kind and, and that sort of, and he loved people. | ||
| And so he would sort of always be pushing, pushing the conversation back to like, I'm giving it much, like I've told you all those verses about protesting funerals and why we have to go and do this and the importance of it. | ||
| And Why we have to thank God for these tragedies, because God is sovereign and He's in control. | ||
| So I'm talking about, scripturally, like, justifying all these things. | ||
| And he kept pushing it back to, because he's not super well-versed in the Bible. | ||
| So he didn't know how to, he's like, I see that the Bible says these things, but what about the family? | ||
| Like, I just cannot imagine going and doing these things to people. | ||
| And so this is all happening, like, on... | ||
| I'm also still having conversations on Twitter with so many other people. | ||
| Twitter became this empathy machine for me. | ||
| It's not just on a picket line where people are butting heads and arguing and debating and yelling. | ||
| Yes, having these, it can be kind of aggressive conversations, but I'm also seeing photos of their cats and them exchanging, joking with their friends. | ||
| And so I'm seeing a side of people and sort of being immersed in this community in a way that I had never been before. | ||
| And so it was really, I'm trying to say, when you say, why did you leave? | ||
| It was so much sort of happening around this time. | ||
| So, when, by the time this, like, pile up of things, um, you know, and I'm processing it, as I'm going through this, I'm also talking to my sister, uh, and, and she was the only, and other people in the church, but she was the only person, if I ever had a doubt or a question or a, | ||
| like, if I thought we're doing something wrong here, she was the only person who would say, yeah, you're right, that doesn't make sense, that, I should say, my sister is, um, Creative and artistic and had a little bit of a reputation for being kind of rebellious, not as submissive as me and our other sister. | ||
| So it was this dynamic of... | ||
| You know, between the two of us, where she was the only person I could fully articulate my thoughts and feelings to. | ||
| And so when I first thought of leaving and I turned around and I thought, I literally, we were painting at a friend's house, painting the walls, and I turned around to set my paintbrush down. | ||
| I thought I had to go and leave that second. | ||
| And I turned around and saw my sister. | ||
| And I thought I can't leave without talking to her. | ||
| So the next day, she came home from work over the lunch hour and we would always go up to my room and we were talking about all these doubts we were having. | ||
| And I was crying and I put my head in her lap. | ||
| And I couldn't even articulate the idea of leaving. | ||
| It was too much. | ||
| It's terrifying. | ||
| And it just seemed like impossible. | ||
| And I said, what if we weren't here? | ||
| And she said, what do you mean? | ||
| And I said, what if we were somewhere else? | ||
| And so that starts this conversation where I cannot let go of all the things that I thought that the church was doing wrong, where our theology was wrong, where we were applying it I mean, in a way that was destructive and unscriptural. | ||
| And she kept pushing the conversation back to, we're never going to see our family again. | ||
| We're going to lose everyone and everything that's ever been important to us. | ||
| There is no hope outside this church. | ||
| All the things that we had learned about outsiders, that they were evil and they could never truly love each other or care about one another. | ||
| They're really just enabling one another on the path to hell. | ||
| And so this back and forth goes on for about four months before we finally actually left. | ||
| And it was as bad or worse as I could have imagined. | ||
| But to get back to the... | ||
| Well, let's get to that. | ||
| Bad or worse, you could have ever imagined. | ||
| So you left. | ||
| How did you leave? | ||
| Uh, we were talking to my parents and, you know, and it was another, another issue had come up and I, I couldn't, we couldn't, it was a battle that we weren't going to fight again. | ||
| We kept, I should say in those four months, I kept trying to, to articulate these doubts in a way that the church would accept, like trying to convince them, not being as open, like, but as time went on, I became more and more open about About these questions and doubts. | ||
| We couldn't fight it anymore. | ||
| I just looked at Grace and I said, we have to go. | ||
| And I should say also, we had already been packing. | ||
| We had started packing our things about a little over a month before that, and we had started taking boxes to our friend's house. | ||
| And with the understanding, he was our high school English teacher that we had kept up with on Twitter. | ||
| And we basically told him, if something changes, if the church changes and these things get better, then we'll take all our stuff back and just pretend like none of this ever happened. | ||
| And he was just understanding and compassionate and really supportive. | ||
| So we had done all this stuff already, but we actually had to go and pack the rest of our things. | ||
| So we walked out of our parents' bedroom and went and started packing, and people started coming, my brother and some of the elders and my aunt, my cousin, people. | ||
| We were very close. | ||
| My whole life revolved around the church. | ||
| And so to look these people in the face and say that the us-them mentality, The bonds that are created in environments like that are incredibly strong. | ||
| At least they were in our church. | ||
| And again, most of these people are also my family. | ||
| So it was awful. | ||
| And I'm crying and packing and trying to explain to them why we're leaving. | ||
| And I can hardly talk. | ||
| I was so overwhelmed. | ||
| We actually had to go back the next day with a U-Haul to get the rest of our stuff. | ||
| Our parents helped us pack. | ||
| It's not one of those... | ||
| There are some groups like that where they don't want you to leave. | ||
| They'll try to stop you from leaving. | ||
| I heard Scientology, Miscavige... | ||
| Ron? | ||
| Yeah, he was talking about actual obstacles to you leaving. | ||
| Physically, you can't get out of the gate. | ||
| Nothing like that. | ||
| They always would say, this is a volunteer army, and if you don't want to be here, then you don't belong here. | ||
| So it's just the threat of losing everything and everyone. | ||
| Alienation. | ||
| Yeah, being ostracized by and just sort of expelled into this world that you believe and have always believed is evil and without hope and doomed. | ||
| So how did you do it? | ||
| How did... | ||
| You got all your stuff packed, people are coming in, they're saying... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, like, they're trying to convince us, but once they understand that we're not being convinced, that, you know, they walked away. | ||
| So, I mean, that night our dad dropped us off at a hotel, and then... | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah, like, it's so immediate that you become this... | ||
| You become other. | ||
| You become an outsider. | ||
| Like, and the next morning when we went back, I rang the doorbell. | ||
| I rang the doorbell. | ||
| To your own house. | ||
| And I had lived in that house from the day I was born. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| So you felt like you had to ring the doorbell. | ||
| Like, this is not my world anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Grace was like, why did you ring the doorbell? | ||
| And it was like, there's no other... | ||
| There is nothing else. | ||
| Like, this is not our home. | ||
| This is not... | ||
| So we go and, you know, we're packing all of our things. | ||
| It was just... | ||
| It was awful. | ||
| Just a... | ||
| I had been, in those four months, I had been so terrified of, because knowing what was coming, like, just imagine you're going to lose everyone in your life. | ||
| You're just going to, like, you're not going to, like, how your parents met and fell in love, or, like, your grandparents, and family recipes, and photos, and memories, and what did the house list? | ||
| I'm, like, taking photos and voice recordings and just all the time, like, every, it was just, it's overwhelming. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| But was there also like a feeling of relief? | ||
| Was there also a feeling of like, we actually did it. | ||
| I'm actually doing it. | ||
| It's actually happening. | ||
| I'm going to get away from this. | ||
| I know this isn't real. | ||
| I know this isn't right. | ||
| Did you understand that it was a cult? | ||
| So I was really against, and I still don't intend not to use that word. | ||
| I mean, it's a fine shorthand, I guess, for some. | ||
| There are aspects of the church that are not cultish, for sure, like what I just said. | ||
| Like, there's no, they're not trying to get your money. | ||
| They're not trying to, like, not some charismatic leader trying to have sex with everybody's wives and children or whatever. | ||
| It's nothing like that. | ||
| But there are definitely aspects that are cultish. | ||
| The fact that you can't... | ||
| There is no such thing as agreeing to disagree. | ||
| And the penalty for disagreeing is so high. | ||
| So there are things like that that are definitely cult-like. | ||
| But I was definitely... | ||
| In that moment, I was not okay with using that term for sure. | ||
| It was definitely... | ||
| It took a lot of time. | ||
| Well, it's a derogatory term, but what it represents is an ideology that a group subscribes to. | ||
| It doesn't necessarily have to have all the negative ramifications of an ideology for it to fit into the category of a cult. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I totally understand that now, which is why, like, you know, if somebody says it, I sometimes will say there are things that aren't cult-like and explain what I think is not, but I'm also, I don't do it every single time. | ||
| I understand that it's... | ||
| So, you get all your stuff, after you ring the doorbell, you're gone, and then how do you, like, enter into the world? | ||
| Did you have a job back then, or did you have a job with the church? | ||
| It was a job with the church, working for the law firm. | ||
| So it's home, job, family, life, just everything all at once. | ||
| And then also, of course, you're going into a world that I had just spent my entire life protesting. | ||
| It's so crazy when I look back now at videos, which I couldn't do for a long time, but there's tons of videos and interviews and documentaries. | ||
| You know, where I'm answering all these questions, and it's crazy to me. | ||
| Were you there when Louis Theroux came out to do the documentary? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you talk to him while he was there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Both times. | ||
| The first time, he was really super nice. | ||
| You know, he came, and we were, like, making egg rolls together and, like, going bowling and jumping on the trampoline, and, yeah, he would come to pickets. | ||
| And it was really funny because like, so he came for three weeks, like, but three weeks, like a month, like, one month he came for a week and the next month came for another week and then came again. | ||
| So the first time, like, I didn't know anything about him or who he was really. | ||
| I mean, I knew he was from the BBC, obviously, and that But I hadn't seen any of his stuff. | ||
| And then before he came the next time, I was supposed to be studying for a test or something. | ||
| I was in college and I was procrastinating. | ||
| So I look on YouTube and find this documentary that he did. | ||
| Do you know the one, the white supremacy, the Nazis, Louis and the Nazis? | ||
| So I watched that entire documentary and I was like, ah, like I know what his angle is. | ||
| Like it's the, oh, these poor kids, they were raised in this and they don't know any better. | ||
| And at the time, I was kind of indignant, because I was like, I'm a thinking person, you know? | ||
| Like, all my life growing up, like, it was never just, like I explained about the soldiers' funerals, like, I never just went along with something. | ||
| Like, I wanted to understand why. | ||
| I needed to understand that it was scriptural and from the Bible, and so if you could show me that, then... | ||
| But, like, I'm a curious person, so... | ||
| But I just had never obviously questioned, like, the... | ||
| The most foundational premises of our belief system, which is the Bible is the infallible Word of God, and Westboro Baptist Church are the only ones who can understand it correctly. | ||
| I just never really got past that, because if it was in the Bible and it made sense to me, then it was fine. | ||
| Anyway, I was kind of indignant when I saw what Louis was trying to do. | ||
| We're just poor children. | ||
| I went and told my family, so then everybody knew about it, what he was doing. | ||
| I remember telling him something about how he was insidious, what he was doing, because he was not being honest. | ||
| He was being really friendly, but not being honest about what he really thought about us. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| And what did he say to that? | ||
| Well, he said, actually, he actually addressed it specifically in the second documentary. | ||
| He said, you've been saying this, but I've never pretended to agree with you. | ||
| I've never, I've been pretty, pretty honest about it. | ||
| And I'm an atheist. | ||
| I don't believe that what you're doing is right. | ||
| I don't believe the Bible is the word of God. | ||
| And so I, of course, I mean, he's right. | ||
| He was exactly right. | ||
| But I definitely couldn't see it at the time. | ||
| Well, you leave, you get out, and then what do you do? | ||
| Do you get a job? | ||
| So I thought immediately, so my degree is in finance, so I went through business school, all these people saying, you know, start saving for retirement, immediately da-da-da. | ||
| So, you know, we believed that the doom of the world was imminent, so I never really did that. | ||
| So end of days type stuff? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So you were thinking that because of all the sin, one day there's going to be a reckoning and all the Christians are going to vanish. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Destruction is imminent was one of our signs. | ||
| Did you guys ever watch that movie? | ||
| Those two terrible movies with Kirk Cameron about the apocalypse. | ||
| Goddamn it. | ||
| Left Behind? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, they're so good. | ||
| You should watch them. | ||
| You just said they were terrible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I will watch them. | |
| They are terrible, but they're so good. | ||
| They're so bad that they become like, oh my God, what the fuck is this? | ||
| Did you ever meet Kirk Cameron? | ||
| No. | ||
| I want to meet that dude. | ||
| No, it's really funny. | ||
| You listen to Sam Harris's podcast? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So his episode with Lawrence Wright, he said something like... | ||
| Lawrence Wright said something like... | ||
| Author of Going Clear, the book on Scientology. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| He said... | ||
| He talks about Freud, the narcissism of small differences. | ||
| And I was like, oh my god, yes. | ||
| We, other Christians, were some of our biggest targets. | ||
| And it would be the smallest things. | ||
| For instance, there was one church that we had some kind of very little affiliation with in the early days of the picketing. | ||
| And then their women started to cut their hair. | ||
| Those bitches. | ||
| Women are not allowed to cut their hair. | ||
| You're not allowed to cut your hair at all? | ||
| We weren't allowed to cut our hair at all, yeah, no. | ||
| Oh my God, that's hilarious. | ||
| Because of a Bible verse. | ||
| What does the Bible verse say? | ||
| It's 1 Corinthians 11, 14, I think, actually. | ||
| It says, a woman's hair is her glory. | ||
| It says, don't you know, doesn't nature itself teach you that it's a shame for a man to have long hair? | ||
| But a woman's hair is her glory, and it's given to her for a covering. | ||
| And it says long hair, right? | ||
| So my grandfather interpreted that to mean uncut. | ||
| Which, again, we didn't believe in interpretation at the church. | ||
| The fact that he was adding something into the Bible that wasn't there before. | ||
| Because obviously you can have long hair and still cut it. | ||
| But if long hair is good, then uncut is better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, he had his rules. | |
| What about clothes? | ||
| How do you reconcile the fact that you're not supposed to wear two different types of cloth? | ||
| So the church sees this as the distinction between the ceremonial law of Moses and the moral law. | ||
| So the ceremonial law is like mixed fabrics and keeping kosher. | ||
| Isn't it like penalty by death of mixed fabrics? | ||
| I actually can't remember. | ||
| Something preposterous like that. | ||
| We didn't worry about it, though, because we thought these passages in the New Testament said you don't have to follow those ceremonial laws. | ||
| So we didn't worry about it. | ||
| But did you guys spend any time researching the actual history of the New Testament, like how it was constructed? | ||
| So not, I mean, some, yes, but not really because in our minds, God is sovereign, right? | ||
| So the church believes in predestination. | ||
| So God controls everything and everyone. | ||
| So God controlled the construction of the New Testament as well. | ||
| Exactly, right. | ||
| Even though it was done by men, it was God's will to have it be. | ||
| So it was all God's word. | ||
| Yep, exactly. | ||
| How convenient. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| That's a nice little loophole. | ||
| You just don't have to ask those questions. | ||
| But what about the fact that it was like Constantine wasn't even a Christian until his deathbed? | ||
| Is that because God didn't want it to be that way? | ||
| It's irrelevant. | ||
| That's a nice sweet loophole. | ||
| If you could just say that it's God's will. | ||
| God knew the entire time. | ||
| Don't worry about it. | ||
| But it's a bunch of men wrote it. | ||
| Yeah, but they did it because God let them do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But then the question is, which version? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Which is another question. | ||
| I sort of instinctively avoid it. | ||
| It's like atheists would ask this question, like, why the King James Version? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, you can't really answer because Gramps said so. | ||
| Like, that's not... | ||
| Did we actually say that my grandfather was the first pastor, the only pastor found at the Westeropters Church? | ||
| I don't think we did, but I think everybody kind of knows. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, good. | |
| Hopefully everybody knows. | ||
| Grandpa. | ||
| Grandpa was Fred Phelps, right? | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| Anyway, I just wanted to close that loop. | ||
| So, it's just... | ||
| What was the thought process behind just accepting that kind of stuff? | ||
| Did your grandfather ever bring up the even older versions of the Bible that they were finding? | ||
| What was his thoughts on the Dead Sea Scrolls and things along those lines? | ||
| Just didn't address it. | ||
| Because it just didn't matter. | ||
| It's all God's word anyway. | ||
| It's God's will. | ||
| It's God's word. | ||
| It's so fascinating when someone's so rigid with their belief system. | ||
| It's like, this is it. | ||
| And as long as you believe that it's all God's will, it's like, oh, it's God's will. | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| But the New Testament was written by Constantine and a bunch of bishops. | ||
| God's will. | ||
| And God let them do it. | ||
| And not just let them do it, but caused them. | ||
| Caused him. | ||
| Forced it. | ||
| Made it happen. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| He knows what he's doing. | ||
| Yep, absolutely. | ||
| Every word of our conversation, the church would think that this is all... | ||
| Well, how does God allow all the, you know, sodomy and all the crazy shit going on? | ||
| Why does God allow that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, this is why I'm not a Christian anymore. | |
| Oh, you got confused. | ||
| And you're like, what the... | ||
| Well, so there's this passage in Romans 9. Well, it's not the only reason I should say, but I have real trouble with this. | ||
| And I think it's still hard for me to say, I think this is evil, but I think this is evil. | ||
| There's this passage in Romans 9 that talks about, it gives this analogy of God as potter and humans as clay in his hands. | ||
| And it uses the example of Jacob and Esau, who in the Bible, Jacob and Esau were twins. | ||
| And it says, while they were yet in the womb, before either of them had done good or evil, God loved Jacob and hated Esau. | ||
| And so it paints this picture of God, you know, it says, What if God, willing to show his wrath and make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath made for destruction? | ||
| So it says, God created some people as vessels of mercy, people that he loves, and others as vessels of wrath made for destruction. | ||
| So made for the express purpose of destroying them, of torturing them in hell for eternity. | ||
| So, and then, so he, it's Paul who's writing, He paints this picture, God making you do all of the things that you do and then blessing some and cursing others. | ||
| And he says, well, you're going to ask me then, why does God yet find fault for who has resisted his will? | ||
| Right? | ||
| So if God's making you do it, why is he punishing you for it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| If God's making you do a horrible thing and you resist his will. | ||
| You can't resist his will. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So he makes you do it and then he punishes you for it. | ||
| And the answer is, you don't get to ask that question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Oh. | ||
| It says, Nay, but O man, who art thou that replyest against God? | ||
| Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, why hast thou made me this? | ||
| You just don't get to ask that question. | ||
| And to me, so this is, I've asked, like, for, I spent a long time talking to Christians and, you know, people of, well, mostly Christians, because it's obviously this New Testament, so, and, but also talking to Jewish people about the Old Testament and found so many of the, like, interpretations, so many of our beliefs were, They're not fully supported by the Bible and that there are so many different ways of interpreting. | ||
| So many are the more destructive of our beliefs. | ||
| But that one, I have not found any explanation for that passage that makes any kind of sense, that's consistent with the text and not evil. | ||
| And I just, I didn't, I thought I couldn't ask that question for so long when I was at the church, right? | ||
| I thought, I just have to accept this, this is the truth, and nothing that I feel or think matters against it. | ||
| But now, I can't not think. | ||
| I cannot ask the questions. | ||
| Yeah, that had to be so strange. | ||
| It's also strange when you read the passages in the Bible and they're in thou and thy and you go, wow, like what a weird, like you're reading something in a style of communicating and thinking that we don't even use anymore. | ||
| Like how strange is that? | ||
| Like if you had a conversation with a rational person and they started talking and thou and thy, you'd be like, What are you... | ||
| Why are you using those words? | ||
| Like, what's going on here? | ||
| Are you okay? | ||
| Like, are you a crazy person? | ||
| But as long as you're quoting some ancient stuff, you're allowed to do it. | ||
| Like, and it just... | ||
| It sort of highlights how bizarre scripture really is and how bizarre these ideological imperatives, these ideological, like, pathways that are just completely rigid and carved in stone. | ||
| You have to follow them. | ||
| But then you're listening. | ||
| You're like... | ||
| Nobody even talks like this anymore. | ||
| Like, this is such a strange... | ||
| And they didn't even talk like that then when they wrote it. | ||
| Because you're dealing with something that was in ancient Hebrew, and then it was translated to Latin, and it was translated to Greek, and by the time it gets to English, like, boy, what a terrible game of telephone. | ||
| You know, the grapevine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's just these are questions that I never thought I could ask or that, again, that it didn't matter because if God, you know, foreordained all of it, then it wasn't relevant. | ||
| But there's also, I mean, like, there is so, and I was talking to Sam Harris about this this morning, he, like, there are so many things in the Bible that I find so much good there also. | ||
| And, like, the language is something that, like, yeah, I know it sounds so weird to people, but, to a lot of people, but, like, the King James, like, I grew up, like, again, my mother was reading this to us every night, and so these words, there's actually a passage that says, I found thy, like, talking to God, I found thy words, and I did eat them, and they were unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart, right? | ||
| So it was this thing where I loved it. | ||
| I loved these ideas. | ||
| I thought it was the truth and I thought it was the definition of goodness because God did it and God said it. | ||
| But even now, there's this one passage that I really love. | ||
| It says, By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone. | ||
| It's a soft tongue break at the bone, that phrase. | ||
| I love the imagery. | ||
| I did this TED talk a few months ago, and it was kind of about this modern political discourse, this tribalism. | ||
| This is becoming these calcified positions and failures of empathy. | ||
| And, like, people think that because, you know, they're so sure that they're right, that their position is the right position, they're willing to talk to the other side in ways that, they're just, it's just, it's terrible. | ||
| It's the way that I did at the church. | ||
| It's the way that, it's, you know, that dismissive, condescending, you know, just hostile, aggressive, angry. | ||
| Right, they're the enemy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's, like, it's not... | ||
| It's also cult-like. | ||
| And people don't respond to it. | ||
| Like, they respond, it's this whole complimentary behavior, right? | ||
| It's like somebody approaches you a certain way, you tend to respond in kind. | ||
| So if somebody comes to you in kindness and compassion, you tend to respond, you know, in that way also. | ||
| And when you are angry and aggressive and hostile, like, it just elicits the same reaction. | ||
| People get defensive. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that verse, I love that verse. | ||
| It's a beautiful verse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Well, there's obviously some wisdom from what those people were writing down and trying to translate what that wisdom was. | ||
| And there's some really fascinating passages. | ||
| To me, it's always been most fascinating as a time capsule. | ||
| Like, when I read it, I'm like, well, regardless of who translated this, this is still a thousand-year-old book, at the very least, in terms of, you know, or 2,000 years old. | ||
| That alone is really amazing. | ||
| You're reading the thoughts and the ideas of how someone was perceiving the world 2,000 years ago, or roughly. | ||
| There's something to it where you're... | ||
| It also solidifies, in my mind, how briefly... | ||
| Human beings have been conscious of their time here on earth 2,000 years ago is Not very long. | ||
| I mean it seems like an incredibly long time for a person only lives to be a hundred But in terms of the the age of the the human race itself, which I think they just Backdated again. | ||
| They found a new discovery where they pushed back the oldest known human being by over a thousand a hundred thousand years yesterday Some new discovery, some new bones. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| So now they know modern human beings have been around for at least 300,000 years. | ||
| It's probably going to go back even further than that. | ||
| They don't even know. | ||
| But that's so cool. | ||
| I was going to say, I actually think Rob Wolf... | ||
| Oldest Homo sapiens species discovered in Morocco. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What does it say? | ||
| Time. | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| Add 100,000 years to the history of modern human fossils. | ||
| These bones are from early anatomically modern humans, our own species, Homo sapiens, with a mixture of modern and primitive traits. | ||
| An international team of anthropologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary scientists report a pair of papers published in Wednesday in the Journal of Nature. | ||
| Evolutionary. | ||
| What was evolution talk like back at home? | ||
| We didn't believe it. | ||
| What about dinosaurs? | ||
| Young Earth creationism. | ||
| One of the elders said something like, God brought baby dinos on the ark. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| They didn't make it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They drowned? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Anytime there was any conflict or apparent conflict between the Bible and evidence, you know, physical evidence, we just believe the Bible. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It's the Bible. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But what you're saying about ancient wisdom, there was this... | ||
| So my husband, he got super into paleo a few years ago, and he read John Durant's book, The Paleo Manifesto, and he made me read one chapter of it, and it was called Moses the Microbiologist. | ||
| And Rob Wolf, I was going to say, Rob Wolf mentioned it on your podcast, whatever that was, a few weeks ago or whatever. | ||
| And it's so fascinating to, like, when you read Leviticus, like, without the context, you know, the time and the time they were living in. | ||
| Like, a lot of it just seemed like, I remember whenever we'd be reading this at home, you know, as a family, like, there was just so much of it that just seemed, like, incredibly tedious and, like, what are we supposed to be getting out of this? | ||
| Like, I don't even understand. | ||
| So I read this chapter, and it was so, like, incredible, talking about, like, Jewish, the rules about washing your hands, which is, like, of course, the simplest and most effective form of Sure. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then not eating like cats because cats eat like rodents who also carry. | ||
| Anyway, but it's like, it's super, there's so much detail in there. | ||
| And it was, it's incredibly fascinating. | ||
| So like there's, when you think about like just the history of humanity and how this book has shaped people's lives for so long, it's, it's, it's really, uh, it's really, it's really fascinating. | ||
| Well, it is an amazing piece of historical literature. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And it's amazing that so many people have Not to use the term, but use it as gospel. | ||
| I mean, it's the right term, right? | ||
| And I always feel strange whenever I read it. | ||
| Whenever I read it, I feel strangely thinking about all the momentum and all the history that has been altered by these words and by the application of these words. | ||
| And your own history, when your own life was essentially guided by the application of the interpretation of these words that were thousands of years old. | ||
| I mean, that is bizarre. | ||
| But then, what's even more bizarre to me is that Twitter's what snaps you out of it. | ||
| Is that interacting with people through online, this open forum exchange of ideas, and especially in Twitter where it's this 140 character limit. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| It really bugs me that Twitter gets such a bad rap. | ||
| Because it has saved your life. | ||
| You should have a t-shirt that says, Twitter saved my life. | ||
| I think I might actually do that. | ||
| I went to Twitter actually a year ago and I'm going next week too. | ||
| I joined their Trust and Safety Council. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That always sounds so Orwellian to me. | ||
| And I found out some of the people that are on it, and they're full of shit. | ||
| There's a lot of BS, social justice warrior nonsense going on in that council. | ||
| I'm definitely not on the censorship. | ||
| Or, you know, trying to, like, stop people. | ||
| Shadow banning people. | ||
| I just don't know enough about all of that stuff. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| But obviously, like, I'm definitely on the side of... | ||
| I mean, I want people to be able to control their experiences on Twitter, of course. | ||
| So, I mean, you should be able to, like... | ||
| Definitely be able to block people and mute people and all that stuff. | ||
| That's all well and good. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what I mean. | ||
| So you should control your experience. | ||
| But trying to stop people from... | ||
| Because when it's criminal, when people are threatening and it's violence and threats of violence, I think that, of course, should be illegal. | ||
| It's illegal. | ||
| It shouldn't be allowed on the platform. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And harassment. | ||
| If you're harassing people or trying to get people to harass people. | ||
| Like soliciting harassment to others. | ||
| Like, hey, let's go after Megan. | ||
| She doesn't believe in God's word anymore. | ||
| Let's go get her. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Using the platform for any sort of a fucked up way like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but I'm obviously much more on the side of the importance of the marketplace of ideas and being able to... | ||
| Oh yeah, it's everything. | ||
| Absolutely, because so many people, we come to bad ideas in so many different ways. | ||
| Sometimes we argue ourselves there, sometimes we're influenced by other people, but the way out of it isn't to pretend or to push it out of the public sphere. | ||
| It's to engage it, to shed light on it, and to publicly argue against it so that other people who might be tempted or starting to go down that path will understand. | ||
| In other words, we need to have people who can articulate and defend good principles and to argue against bad ones so that the good ones will rise to the top. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, that's everything. | ||
| That's human discourse in general, and that's one of the main problems with really rigid ideologies. | ||
| There's no room for that. | ||
| And then you just, like, it's God's word, and this is it, and you just have to trust it, and there's baby dinosaurs on the ark, and you just gotta go, okay. | ||
| And because of that, that, that, like, I have a friend who was Mormon, and she was Mormon for a long time, and then she They just sort of like drifted away. | ||
| They decided it was kind of silly and then they read into the church and they started like, how did this get started? | ||
| And they just decided maybe we should spend some time away. | ||
| And so they eventually left. | ||
| And one of the things that she said that was really fascinating, she said, I'm really susceptible to like like someone who's a bullshit artist It's like she's like I'm easily influenced like too much So she's like growing up in this fundamental environment this fundamentalist You know where you don't question anything and just go along with the word She goes it leaves me really vulnerable to like being influenced and I was like wow that is fascinating She's like I'm really gullible. | ||
| I'm like wow Yeah, it's like her her structure of how she her questioning muscles were like wobbly and weak and atrophy They just didn't have any pep to them That's exactly the word I use also about the decision making because if somebody else is always making the decisions You never have to like the answer is already there for you. | ||
| You don't have to figure it out for yourself So on both of those fronts like when after my sister and I left it was this sort of like more or less constant You know, processing and asking these questions. | ||
| So like, I would have these. | ||
| So for instance, like, back to gay people after we left, right? | ||
| So I got this guy wrote an open letter, like he'd been somebody that I had sparred with on Twitter quite a bit, and threatened to pick it, but never actually did. | ||
| He wrote an open letter after my sister and I published this statement, essentially just this short explanation that, you know, we had left and that we regretted hurting people and that we were trying to find a better way to live, basically, just because we'd been so public at the church. | ||
| It seemed like... | ||
| We had to. | ||
| It seemed like... | ||
| And also, it's complicated. | ||
| But anyway, so we did this. | ||
| He writes this open letter in response and invited us to church over at Hollywood United Methodist Church. | ||
| And he was gay. | ||
| He is gay. | ||
| He's a gay churchgoer? | ||
| He is, yeah. | ||
| And how does he reconcile all the anti-gay stuff? | ||
| I was going to say, so you said... | ||
| Earlier, just the accepting, whatever you find in the Bible, so therefore you have to accept it and just go along with it, no matter what evidence or whatever seems to contradict it or whatever. | ||
| I was going to say, I encountered people for the first time, including... | ||
| I'm actually not sure how he reconciles it. | ||
| I think it has to do with the love of Jesus and grace and just... | ||
| That's the Old Testament and whatever. | ||
| I'm not exactly... | ||
| Doesn't the New Testament represent... | ||
| It does. | ||
| It does. | ||
| Homosexuality, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I honestly don't really know. | ||
| Just like, la, la, la, not listening. | ||
| Well, so that's what I was going to say. | ||
| I remember encountering for the first time Christians who were willing to say, yeah, I know the Bible says that, but I think that applied at a different time, or I just don't believe that. | ||
| Well, I know a dude, I know more than one, that has an Old Testament Bible quote tattoo. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Like, hey, you got to read the whole book, man. | ||
| It says don't get tattooed. | ||
|
unidentified
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You can't just go, God, I'm really into what you're saying. | |
| No, you're not. | ||
| You're not even listening. | ||
| But like that, I think it's honest, right? | ||
| To be able to say, yes, I think this is good, but to have the wherewithal to say, yeah, this is good and this is wrong. | ||
| There's a Bible verse actually that says, hate the evil and love the good. | ||
| And I love that. | ||
| I mean, when I say hate, it's never about, for me, it's about people. | ||
| It's about ideas. | ||
| I think there are a lot of bad ideas. | ||
| And so I try to, well, anyways. | ||
| There are a lot of bad ideas, and there's a lot of people that get defined by bad ideas. | ||
| And I think in that way, the Bible is a lot like people, in that... | ||
| You could take a really good person who does something stupid, does something wrong, does something bad, and it doesn't mean they're a bad person. | ||
| You can't say, like, you are this time you ran this red light and hit that car, or you are this time where you, whatever you did that you shouldn't have done, that you may have done impulsively, or for whatever reason. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That doesn't necessarily define you. | ||
| It's a moment in your life. | ||
| But we love to find moments like that and say, that's you, Tiger Woods. | ||
| That is you. | ||
| You are bad. | ||
| I don't like you now. | ||
| I hate you. | ||
| No matter what you do in the future, you will be defined by this moment that you got drunk and drove a car or whatever the fuck it is. | ||
| It's so frustrating now. | ||
| The tendency now on... | ||
| Did you read John Ronson's book? | ||
| Yes, you did. | ||
| So You've Been Publicly Shamed. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That tendency that... | ||
| We love it. | ||
| My family, it was incredibly judgmental, even within the church. | ||
| It became even more so towards the end of... | ||
| Before my sister and I left, where... | ||
| This is the way that my sister and I started talking about it after we left. | ||
| It's like everything that looks bad is bad and everything that looks good is also bad. | ||
| If you identify a person as some kind of troublemaker, you can just read into the worst intentions and motives when it's just as likely that it isn't bad. | ||
| To generalize the worst... | ||
| Sorry, it's getting under your jaw and so we're losing some of the sound. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry, sorry. | |
| That's okay. | ||
| I kind of talk a little bit soft, too, sometimes. | ||
| But you just don't want to generalize the worst about people and make that their entire identity. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And there's a tendency to do that with people that are also terrified of scrutiny coming their way. | ||
| So what they do is they cast it all out on others instead of looking internally, instead of looking at their own actions, and they like to find a fault in a person, and then that is their main focus. | ||
| And you see people doing that. | ||
| That is why tabloid journalism is so fascinating. | ||
| You go to the supermarket and, you know, Matt Lauer's doing cocaine. | ||
| Oh, look at that. | ||
| You know, it's like right there in front of you. | ||
| Whether or not it's real, who knows? | ||
| But it's like, I want to see how he got caught. | ||
| What did he do wrong? | ||
| What did this person do? | ||
| He's doing drugs or whatever. | ||
| Whatever anybody's doing. | ||
| She's leaving him for her. | ||
| She's a lesbian. | ||
| And all this stuff that we love when someone did something bad, then everybody's watching it. | ||
| We love it because we all know that there's some creepy shit that we've done that if somebody found it and then everybody started talking about it, you'd be horrified. | ||
| So when you see someone getting caught, publicly shamed, and then this giant pile on, it's very attractive to us in some weird way and almost cathartic and almost a relief that it's not us. | ||
| Yeah, but it's so dangerous, right? | ||
| Because when you make it, when the penalty for speaking up and possibly misstepping in these various, and I don't, the whole idea of microaggressions, fundamentally, it's this, and I understand, I'm not saying, I think it's really important, I've said this so many times, how we talk to people. | ||
| It matters how you talk to people, but if we're always looking for For offense. | ||
| We're going to find it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the problem is when people say something maybe not quite in exactly the right way, the way that we punish people, when we make the penalty so high, just to go back to John Ronson's book, Justine Sacco, you know, tasteless joke on Twitter to her 170 followers or whatever, and then it blows up and her entire life is over. | ||
| Yeah, people don't know the story. | ||
| Do you remember the joke? | ||
| Yeah, I'm going to South Africa. | ||
| Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. | ||
| I'm white. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And that turned her life inside out. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I don't mean to say, like, I'm not saying, like, I'm just saying there has to be more to get biblical grace. | ||
| Like, there's this writer that I love, actually, and she says that the language of public discourse has lost the, how does she put it, Public discourse has lost the language of generosity. | ||
| And I think that's really terrible. | ||
| So when you make the cost of misspeaking or of maybe not saying things in exactly the right way, when you make that cost so high, what it does is it pushes out moderates. | ||
| And what you end up with is people on both two ends of these extremes, and they're the only ones talking. | ||
| And then it just, again, reinforces this calcification and us-them and tribalism, and it's dangerous. | ||
| I think you're 100% right. | ||
| I also think there's something that's going on where when you see someone do something really stupid like Kathy Griffin holding up ahead of Donald Trump, I think we realize that in our worst day, with our worst thought process, worst circumstances, that could easily be us. | ||
| And the worst, if you grew up in a fucked up way, or you have some imbalance in your personal life, or maybe you have some chemical imbalance, or you're depressed, and then you make a poor judgment call, or you get reinforced by other people around you that are fools as well, the next thing you know you're doing something dumb. | ||
| And that is... | ||
| That's why we like watching people balance and do handstands on top of buildings. | ||
| Because we know that we've taken risks. | ||
| We know we've done something stupid. | ||
| You can identify those aspects of human behavior in other folks. | ||
| And when they're doing something particularly terrible, there's a certain amount of relief that it's not you. | ||
| And there's a certain amount of fascination of how will this play out. | ||
| How is this person going to recover from this? | ||
| All that stuff is very, very intoxicating to us as these tribal animals that live together and understand how valuable it is to have the love and support of your peers. | ||
| And then that hate is so dangerous. | ||
| The ostracizing of a person from the group, the alienation of them from the social community, the knowledge that they have that people are talking about. | ||
| Kathy Griffin, she's an American. | ||
| She needs to burn in hell and all this. | ||
| That is going to be just eating away at her. | ||
| And we know it. | ||
| And it's one of the reasons why we like to concentrate on it. | ||
| There's a certain amount of weird sort of voyeurism that's involved in any sort of a public misstep that people have. | ||
| And then the pile on by... | ||
| And a lot of people are just very, very unhappy with their lives. | ||
| And so when someone else does something screwed up that they can take away some of the focus of their own missteps and focus it on this person and throw rocks. | ||
| And there's also just this sense of, I mean, righteousness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| Self-righteousness. | ||
| And this is why there's a... | ||
| Did you see Sarah Silverman's new Netflix special? | ||
| No, I haven't seen it yet. | ||
| So she gets to a point and she's talking about going out to a picket, a Westboro picket. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And I actually had seen... | ||
| She talked about this on Bill Maher a few years ago, too. | ||
| And I just remember... | ||
| I knew her as this... | ||
| I didn't really, of course, know her anything specific except her comedy. | ||
| She seemed kind of just kind of loud and a little, I don't know, she would say things that would always make me cringe, like just very blunt. | ||
| So you listened to her comedy while you were in the church? | ||
| A little, like not a lot. | ||
| Did you just sneak it? | ||
| No. | ||
| They're constantly, they call themselves the watchers, right? | ||
| So they... | ||
| Are looking around the landscape and seeing how the Word of God applies to all these people. | ||
| In order to comment on what's going on, they have to know what's going on. | ||
| So what people are saying and the trends and things. | ||
| When I saw her on Bill Moore, I expected her to be, I don't know, hostile and whatever about the church when she started talking about them. | ||
| But what she said was, at least on the special, the way she put it was, I am them. | ||
| She went out and was talking to members of my family. | ||
| And she said, we have to see them as human. | ||
| And she was kind to them on the picket line. | ||
| She said, I told a duty joke or whatever. | ||
| And the picketer, I guess one of my cousins or something, snickered when she makes this joke. | ||
| We have to see them as human, and then maybe they'll start to see us as human. | ||
| And the way she put it on the Netflix special was, I am them. | ||
| I am the product of my experiences, and so are they. | ||
| And the only way you can change those things is to add to those experiences, to introduce, like David did on Twitter with me and my husband, introduce these ideas in ways that people can actually hear them and be moved by them. | ||
| Yeah, we love to categorize people into these rigid boxes that are unchangeable, and that you are this person, you will always be this person, you are my enemy, and you think this, and you think that, and you're a dirty liberal, and you're a disgusting Republican, and we have these weird ideological boxes that we love to shove people into. | ||
| That's a perfect example of that. | ||
| I mean, if they were little kids and they grew up in that church and they're seven years old, Do we really believe that they would have the wherewithal and the understanding of the full spectrum of human behavior to say that this is wrong, and that we shouldn't be protesting at this gay person's funeral, and we shouldn't be holding up these signs to say God hates fags? | ||
| Does God hate fags or not? | ||
| Like, are you right, Grandpa? | ||
| Like, who would have the mind? | ||
| What's incredibly brave is that you, deep into your 20s, Have this revelation and then have the courage to escape. | ||
| And so I want to get back to that. | ||
| What was your job? | ||
| What was the first job you got? | ||
| So I didn't get a job immediately. | ||
| I thought I had to. | ||
| I thought I have to be responsible. | ||
| Of course, I'm with my sister. | ||
| We had some money saved. | ||
| We lived at home. | ||
| We didn't have a lot of expenses. | ||
| We used our money to travel across the country picketing, but we still had some money. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We've got to get out there and piss people off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I thought it was the greatest. | ||
| It was always exciting. | ||
| Are you going on this picket trip? | ||
| Yeah, I'm going to Los Angeles. | ||
| We're going to picket Scientology. | ||
| It was just like a part of life. | ||
| You guys used to picket Scientology? | ||
| A little. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| I remember doing it in Clearwater once too. | ||
| It was super boring. | ||
| There was nobody out there. | ||
| You gotta rank the pickets by like, I don't know, George W. Bush's second inauguration was like insane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, was it? | |
| And there's like Scientology. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that was like post 9-11. | ||
| Must have been really rough to hold up those signs. | ||
| Yeah, especially we had a sign that said thank God for 9-11. | ||
| Oh, God damn it. | ||
| And it was like we were stationed like at the intersection of these three streets and they were blocked off for the parade. | ||
| So like he finishes his inauguration speech and it's like huge crowd of people like hundreds of that whatever how many thousands of people like flood down this thing and then they're stuck in this in this intersection waiting to go right past us on the sidewalk and so there was like this They're seeing this, like, thank God for 9-11. | ||
| And it was right after the tsunami, too. | ||
| So my mom was holding the thank God for the tsunamis or whatever. | ||
| And, like, so people are just enraged by the time they actually got to us. | ||
| So, like, we're standing, like, right at the edge of these barricades. | ||
| Like, so on the other side is the parade route. | ||
| And so, like, you know, people were, like, jumping, like, some guy jumped on my back, like, and one another, like, stealing signs and, like... | ||
| Jumped on your back? | ||
| Yeah, I was leaning over the barricade so he couldn't steal my signs. | ||
| Sorry, I'm not getting away from the mic. | ||
| And so one of my cousins actually gave his signs to another church member and then was standing on top of a trash can going, come on, you guys, just don't worry about them. | ||
| They're not worth it. | ||
| They're not worth it. | ||
| It was my cousin who was, you know, just because it was so, it got so physical, like, you know, people, and like the cops. | ||
| So he was saying, you guys aren't worth it? | ||
| He was trying to, yeah, pretending like he was not. | ||
| He was pretending he was one of them. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Subterfuge. | ||
| That one got pretty, yeah, pretty, got pretty dicey. | ||
| Did it get violent? | ||
| Like the guy who jumped on your back, like, what did he do? | ||
| So I'm holding my signs, and I'm like, I've tucked myself into this barricade, so there's nothing else he can do. | ||
| I should also say, there were cops just on the other side of the barricade. | ||
| Every five feet, there was a cop. | ||
| I think there was maybe 14,000 cops in D.C. that day, because it was the first inauguration after 9-11. | ||
| And the cops were mostly just standing there. | ||
| I look over, the guy gets off, and my brother is standing next to me, who's seven or eight years old. | ||
| He would have been like, Early 20s. | ||
| And he jumped over the barricade because of the way people were coming after us. | ||
| And this cop pulls out a club and making us jump back over on the other side with these people and not really doing anything. | ||
| But... | ||
| But did you expect the cops to risk their lives even though you're obviously provoking people? | ||
| I mean, you're obviously putting yourself in a situation where you're saying something incredibly insulting and just devastating to all these people that lost friends or loved ones on 9-11 or in the tsunami or have family members that are gay. | ||
| I mean, did you guys really expect the cops are going to take the beating for you or the cops are going to get involved? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I mean, we thought that it was like, it's their job, right? | ||
| But if they didn't, you would never do what you did then, right? | ||
| Like, what if someone passed some sort of a law saying, listen, you guys know what you're in for. | ||
| We have no desire to help you. | ||
| There will be no police presence. | ||
| Would you still protest? | ||
| Well, we did that. | ||
| Some cops did respond that way. | ||
| Did they say there will be no police presence whatsoever? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where was that at? | ||
| I can't remember, but it happened more than once. | ||
| More than once, yeah, for sure. | ||
| And sometimes the cops, we'd say, we're going to come to protest this, you know, something. | ||
| And they would say, you know, you can come, but you can't hold that sign. | ||
| Or you can't step on the flag or whatever. | ||
| Sometimes they would tell us in advance. | ||
| Sometimes they would wait until we got there. | ||
| You guys would step on the flag? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like we, desecrating the flag was a big, we saw it as an idol and, you know, the American flag is an idol. | ||
| Actually, my mom got arrested. | ||
| I had a, we were in Nebraska and my little brother, we were protesting a soldier's funeral and we were like far away from the church. | ||
| But there was a group of people on the other side of the street and they were all holding American flags all the way from, from the road, all the way up this, you know, the long entry to the, to the church. | ||
| So we were quite far away. | ||
| And my brother was nine years old at the time and he did what he always did, which was, you know, put down, lay the American flag on the ground and stand on top of it and hold a picket sign. | ||
| And within like a couple of minutes, like nine cops showed up and started talking about arresting my mother for flag mutilation and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. | ||
| And so before they do the arrest, you know, again, my mom and my uncle were both there and they are both lawyers. | ||
| And my uncle's like, you know, Johnson versus Texas. | ||
| The Supreme Court said in that case that you can mutilate. | ||
| Not only can you mutilate a flag, you can even burn it. | ||
| And that's perfectly lawful. | ||
| And one of the cops was like, we're not in Texas, we're in Nebraska. | ||
| So like, this is obviously a Supreme Court case. | ||
| So it's and he said, Supreme Court has jurisdiction all over the country. | ||
| So in other words, I guess what I'm saying is like the the way that sometimes the they did, sometimes there were really good cops who did their job more super professional and Didn't let their beliefs about our, you know, religious beliefs or what they thought about our message get in the way of them doing their job. | ||
| But sometimes they did. | ||
| Sometimes they would threaten to arrest, you know, our parents if they brought children. | ||
| They would take their children away from them. | ||
| You know, things like that. | ||
| But we absolutely expected them to do their jobs. | ||
| Like, that was... | ||
| And this is the Supreme Court. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I know you're not justifying it, but... | ||
| It's from the point of view of something like me, someone like me, I would say don't bring any cops there. | ||
| No, if you start that kind of shit at a funeral or for a soldier and a bunch of people come by and beat your ass, well then don't do that again. | ||
| Because you're pissing people off and you're hurting their feelings and you're dealing with someone who's already emotionally scarred. | ||
| Those cops need to be out there stopping robberies and, you know, breaking and entering into people's houses and carjackings and that's what they're supposed to be doing. | ||
| They're not supposed to be, like, helping out people who are intentionally provoking and emotionally disturbing people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I mean, so obviously from the church's perspective, it's like this, it's, these are sincerely held religious beliefs and the first amendment, like what good is the first amendment? | ||
| Like this, obviously this, uh, but it's not a first amendment issue. | ||
| Like the, but because the, it's no one in an official position is saying you cannot speak. | ||
| Well, so, compare that to, like, the campus. | ||
| What's going on on these campuses, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you think that the cops shouldn't be there to protect those people? | ||
| They're provoking people and making them angry? | ||
| Well, it's a different sort of a scenario. | ||
| I think the cops should definitely be there to prevent violence on campus for several reasons. | ||
| One reason, because I think you're dealing with very young, very impressionable people who make very poor choices and feel justified because they're around a bunch of people that also have like-minded ideas, a lot of peer pressure, a lot of diffusion of responsibility that comes from these mass groups of people that are acting, and the mob mentality that comes along with that. | ||
| I think it's very Very important to protect them from themselves, and it's a hot button issue. | ||
| I think protesting at a soldier's funeral is just gross. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I know you do. | ||
| I know you do. | ||
| I mean, but I'm just saying, like, I don't think the cops have a responsibility to save you from being gross. | ||
| Yeah, I just... | ||
| I don't know... | ||
| I mean, obviously, this was a Supreme Court case. | ||
| It became a... | ||
| Did you know that there was a case where we were sued by the church? | ||
| Yeah, I do remember that. | ||
| And how'd that play out? | ||
| It went... | ||
| First, they won a $10.9 million verdict against us at the trial court, and then it was reversed at the appeals court, and the Supreme Court said 8 to 1. They have... | ||
| It's the constitutional right for them to do this. | ||
| This is their religious beliefs. | ||
| They have a right. | ||
| Especially because, I mean... | ||
| Sometimes, I will say, I described to you that very first picket, soldier's funeral picket that I went to, that was very close quarters. | ||
| We were right up on top of them. | ||
| If we had chosen to sing, they would have heard us. | ||
| But in a lot of instances, we were way far away. | ||
| In the instance that went to the Supreme Court, they were more than a thousand feet away. | ||
| There was a hill. | ||
| The family didn't see church members, things like that. | ||
| So, I mean... | ||
| They have a right to do it. | ||
| Who has a right? | ||
| Well, the church. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Okay. | ||
| They have a right to decide. | ||
| They have a right to do it. | ||
| To say horrible things about someone who just died or someone who lost a son or a daughter in war. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think, obviously, I don't, I think it's terrible that they do do it. | ||
| And that was actually one of the things, you know, before my sister and I left, that was one of the, I wasn't going to hold a sign that I didn't believe was true. | ||
| And I wasn't going to go to any more funeral protests. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right, but do you think that the police should... | ||
| I mean, they're operating on tax dollars, and it's a limited amount of resources. | ||
| Well, we're tax... | ||
| I mean, we're taxpayers, right? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Sure you are, but do you think that the resources should go to the... | ||
| It's hard to get out of the we mentality. | ||
| Right, I know. | ||
| I know, but do you think that, really, that the cops, that's an intelligent and adequate and fair use of resources to go and protect a bunch of troublemakers? | ||
| It depends on how you feel about the First Amendment. | ||
| It's the principle of the thing rather than the application. | ||
| This is just one application. | ||
| So who's to decide whether or not it's right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| That's the whole idea. | ||
| We have not entrusted our government to decide... | ||
| What opinions are acceptable and what aren't? | ||
| So they don't get to have... | ||
| Right, but it seems like you're organizing this. | ||
| So if you're organizing this sort of antagonistic display where you know you're going to hurt someone's feelings in a very dangerous time, don't you think you should hire your own security? | ||
| Why should the police have to be there to secure you? | ||
| Because it's the law. | ||
| They are supposed to protect. | ||
| Again, what good are... | ||
| So First Amendment rights, right? | ||
| To be able to say, it doesn't protect popular speech, right? | ||
| Because popular speech doesn't need protection. | ||
| Unpopular speech needs protection. | ||
| So it's just, again, it's the... | ||
| But the police are really there to enforce laws. | ||
| Well, the law is you don't get to punch somebody, right? | ||
| But they're just assuming that something is going to go bad. | ||
| Okay, so for instance, just back to the campus thing for a second. | ||
| You have these people who have announced, we're going to go protest this person, we're not going to let them speak, even though they've been granted permission by the, you know, everybody, like, they're going, they should be able to speak, right? | ||
| But we're not going to let them speak, because we don't like their message. | ||
| So, if the cops know that that's going to happen... | ||
| So, what happens? | ||
| I'm just trying to compare this. | ||
| They don't do anything about it. | ||
| They let them shut it down. | ||
| But I'm saying, I think that's wrong. | ||
| I think they should be able... | ||
| They should go and... | ||
| So, you think the cops should be able to... | ||
| A heckler's veto is what it's called, right? | ||
| I think the cops can't say... | ||
| Well, obviously, this is still back to... | ||
| It's not, if the cops say, well, you can't speak because you're likely to cause a riot or people to, you know, some kind of disturbance. | ||
| Like, they're not allowed to do that based on, like, if it's just, this is religious opinion. | ||
| We weren't saying, we want you to hurt us. | ||
| We're not trying to provoke you to hurt us. | ||
| We're trying to deliver this message that we think is The truth of God, right? | ||
| So it wasn't, there's a difference between like deliberately provoking and inciting violence, like deliberately inciting violence and what we were doing, which was, you know, trying to proclaim this message that we thought was the truth. | ||
| Our goal wasn't violence. | ||
| We didn't want violence. | ||
| That's why we contacted the cops. | ||
| We weren't going to attack them and we didn't want to be attacked. | ||
| We just wanted to be able to exercise our rights without fear of violence. | ||
| That's the principles of our democracy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I see what you're saying, and I think that it gets a little weird when we're talking about people giving speeches on campus and then having other people shut down those speeches. | ||
| Because I think that the people who are protesting have... | ||
| As much right, especially if it's in their school, they have as much right to voice their concern for this message as the person does to distribute that message. | ||
| And if the police come along and say we're going to shut down the distribution of this message, most of the time they do it when things are out of hand. | ||
| So an excellent tool for someone who's trying to silence people is to make sure that things get out of hand. | ||
| Which is why, so that having the cops present, like, and letting both sides have their voices without the ability to resort to violence. | ||
| So this is the whole idea, like, we would, in these letters that would go out to the cops, was that the idea of having a buffer zone, like, yes, we want to proclaim our message. | ||
| We want you to be out there, too. | ||
| Like, we loved, and honestly, we loved it when counter-protesters were there because it just brought more attention to our message. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I understand that, but I just think that you shouldn't, obviously it's not you anymore, but I just do not think that anybody, especially from an offensive group like that, should be able to allocate resources that are public use, like police. | ||
| We didn't make the decision, obviously. | ||
| We didn't make the decision for them to, like, they decide, like, okay, well, is this likely going to, like, so they can either be proactive and set the buffer zone, or be reactive, like, we're calling the cops because we're getting punched or whatever. | ||
| Because, like, they're going to go out no matter what. | ||
| Even when they would say, we're not going to protect you, we would go. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Obviously, there were rare situations where... | ||
| So, for instance, when Gabby Giffords was shot in Arizona, we had a couple of... | ||
| An FBI agent, actually, and... | ||
| A guy from the local police department come and say, like, you shouldn't go, because there was a nine-year-old girl who had been killed. | ||
| And the church said they were going to protest her funeral. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| And so they said, I don't think we can protect you like this. | ||
| It's too volatile. | ||
| It's too... | ||
| And so in that case, we actually didn't go. | ||
| That's kind of a chicken shit response. | ||
| Actually, I was going to say, like, so the thing is, so I was there during this conversation and I heard my mom was explaining that we weren't going to go. | ||
| It actually had more to do with logistics. | ||
| Like, we couldn't get there, like plane tickets and whatever. | ||
| Like, we just couldn't get there. | ||
| So it was like, okay, like, that's fine. | ||
| Like, I hear you. | ||
| You're so reasonable. | ||
| It's so fascinating to talk to you because you're such an intelligent, reasonable person. | ||
| It's almost impossible for me to imagine until I see like the little bit of resistance to the idea of this being a First Amendment issue and the police there. | ||
| Then you kind of go back to the church. | ||
| I could see it boil up inside of you. | ||
| Well, it's just like, we were talking about this a little bit ago. | ||
| I mean, just the whole, the importance of discourse in the marketplace of ideas. | ||
| This is one, like, again, I just think it's so important. | ||
| And I think it's important, you know, because obviously my own personal experience makes me such a believer in... | ||
| Well, you've gone on a journey through free speech that most people never experience. | ||
| Free speech that you don't even agree with anymore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, which is even more crazy. | ||
| So let's go back to your first job. | ||
| What was it? | ||
| What was the first job? | ||
| I worked at a, very briefly, like, so I should say my sister and I, we were in, it was a couple months before I actually got a job. | ||
| We spent the first month with a cousin of mine who had left the church a few years earlier. | ||
| She lived really close. | ||
| She had left as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you guys knew some people had made it out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But the thing is, there's so many... | ||
| My sister calls them mind fucks. | ||
| So the thing about people who leave is that they are demonized more than anybody else. | ||
| Even more than gays or Jews or any other outsider. | ||
| It's ex-members who get the worst... | ||
| You hear the worst things about them because they knew the truth and they rejected it. | ||
| When I thought of leaving, the last thing on my mind was that I could go to an ex-member. | ||
| I thought, you can't trust them. | ||
| They're evil. | ||
| It's just this whole intensely negative instinctive reactions to those things. | ||
| Obviously I overcame it and I reached out to her a few weeks before we left and she was amazing like within I hadn't talked to her in three and a half years and had said all kinds of terrible things you know about her after she left but But she was wonderful and she said like within like 30 seconds of like when I when she understood that I was you know planning to leave I want you to come live with me and it was it was amazing and so kind and so I lived there for | ||
| about a month. | ||
| My sister was still in school, so we were traveling back to Topeka, sorry, so it was half an hour from my cousin's house, you know, four days a week while she was still in school. | ||
| And so we were constantly running into our family and driving by the pickets because they picket every day in Topeka several times a day. | ||
| And like at the grocery store and on campus. | ||
| And so it was just, we needed to get away. | ||
| So we ended up going to Deadwood, South Dakota. | ||
| My brother had been a fan of the TV show and... | ||
| And it just seemed like a nice quiet place. | ||
| So how many people went with you? | ||
| Was it you, your sister, and your brother? | ||
| No, it was just... | ||
| Just you and your sister? | ||
| Me and my sister, yeah. | ||
| Did anybody else join you after a while? | ||
| I have a brother who left about a year and a half after my sister and I did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And I have another brother who left about eight years before I did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So now there's seven. | ||
| There's 11 kids. | ||
| So seven are still at home and four of us are out. | ||
| Do you talk to them? | ||
| Yeah, the people who are out, yeah. | ||
| What about the people that are in? | ||
| No, they won't have anything to do with us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Have you talked to your mom? | ||
| No? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| The thing is, back to Twitter, that's how I know what they're up to. | ||
| They post photos. | ||
| I've been watching my little brothers grow up through photos on Twitter and see what my parents... | ||
| How hard is that? | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| I'm so glad to be living now and not before social media where I can actually see these things and know what they're up to and a little bit about how they're doing. | ||
| Do you want to reach out? | ||
| I do. | ||
| You do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I do on Twitter. | ||
| You know, there's just great about Twitter. | ||
| Sometimes, like, they blocked me on my main account. | ||
| They blocked you? | ||
| Not all of them, but a lot of them. | ||
| Did your mom block you? | ||
| She actually created... | ||
| She got kicked off of Twitter at one point, so she had to create a new account. | ||
| So she didn't block me on her new account yet. | ||
| But she blocked you in her old account? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's deep. | ||
| When your mom blocks you on Twitter, that's tense. | ||
| It's a big thing, right? | ||
| It's really terrible. | ||
| When you look and you see that you're blocked, what is that lump in your throat like? | ||
| Just the way you'd imagine. | ||
| Like, I can't believe, like, it's so hard to think back to, like, I was incredibly close with my mom, and I love her, and I miss her. | ||
| Like, I used to make coffee for her every morning, and, like, we'd go on walks together. | ||
| When was the last time you spoke to her? | ||
| Well, actually, I saw her at a picket a little over a year ago. | ||
| She didn't say anything to me. | ||
| She didn't even talk to you. | ||
| No, she couldn't. | ||
| A baby that came from her body, loved you and raised you, She can. | ||
| When I think about when I was at the church, and this is one of the hardest things to articulate, the feeling of when somebody leaves, there is no interaction. | ||
| Some people would ask, well, what if you saw her at such a place? | ||
| At the grocery store, whatever. | ||
| What would you say? | ||
| They would ask me this while I was still at the church. | ||
| The only thing I can compare it to is dividing by zero. | ||
| The situation does not exist. | ||
| There's nothing... | ||
| The idea of trying to talk to her... | ||
| It's impossible, right? | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| That's the cult. | ||
| That's the cult part, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| In Jehovah's Witnesses, they call it disfellowshipping, right? | ||
| Yeah, they all have it. | ||
| Excommunication. | ||
| Scientology has it. | ||
| They all have it. | ||
| It's one of the ways they control people. | ||
| The fear of alienation is incredibly strong. | ||
| And the fear of becoming like them. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So, they'll talk to gay people. | ||
| They'll talk to people with rainbow shirts on. | ||
| They'll talk to ex-soldiers. | ||
| They'll talk to those people. | ||
| They won't talk to you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| But, this is... | ||
| Get your mono and acid. | ||
| One of the great things about Twitter, and the internet in general, is that it's a thing where... | ||
| Obviously, my little brothers, for instance, they are hearing all this bad stuff about You know, my sister and me, anybody who leaves, they'll hear bad things about us. | ||
| But the good thing about the internet is that they can go on. | ||
| They can go to my Twitter account and see what I'm actually saying. | ||
| So I'm still... | ||
| I go through these phases where, like, I will tweet, and then I get, like, I can't... | ||
| Just, like, the... | ||
| Fear of judgment I guess from my family and I just I just choose to focus on other things and not post things on Twitter but like I still I follow them on this other account that I created that's not blocked right and it's just WBC accounts so like and I see like things that they say and like doctrines that I now believe are unscriptural and so like I will tweet them you know verses like that I what this contradicts you like and try to like basically doing what I was doing for them now against them like just in this right in these instances and and So | ||
| there is some engagement a little bit with my family on Twitter, especially because of anything that I do publicly. | ||
| So maybe something about this. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But when my TED Talk came out, there was a couple of articles and people were tweeting it a lot. | ||
| And, uh, so my uncle and my aunt both were tweeting, tweeting me and tweeting about me. | ||
| And so I was, you know, we're having this repartee, I guess, like just, you know, going back and forth about these, these Bible verses and, and debating. | ||
| And so all of that stuff is, it's, it's, I hope, well, at some point, hopefully we'll have, we'll have some effect. | ||
| And in some ways it already has. | ||
| So like the day that I left, there was a, we're going to get to that job sometime soon. | ||
| Don't worry about it. | ||
| The day that you left? | ||
| The day that I left, one of my cousins, you know, came into my bedroom while I was crying and packing, and I was asking, like, just very calmly, like, this is my best friend. | ||
| She was a year older than me, is a year older than me. | ||
| And, uh... | ||
| She's asking me why we're leaving, and I'm describing a lot of things. | ||
| I described specifically two signs. | ||
| One of them was the death penalty for fags, and another one was fags can't repent. | ||
| She sent me a message the next morning. | ||
| I was describing verses that I thought contradicted those two signs. | ||
| The following morning, she sent me a text message super early in the morning. | ||
| Just, like, just chewing me out, basically. | ||
| Like, that I know that Leviticus and Romans won, like, that death penalty, like, there's no, you have no argument. | ||
| Like, so what's really your problem? | ||
| And so... | ||
| And then for a while after I left, those signs were everywhere. | ||
| My cousin changes her profile picture on Twitter to her holding those two signs screaming into the camera. | ||
| And one of the elders making a snow angel with those two signs. | ||
| So they're just doubling down on this, right? | ||
| And so this goes on. | ||
| During this time, I'm talking about it and giving a few interviews, talking about it there, on Twitter a little bit, reiterating the verses that contradict them. | ||
| And then, like, after more than two years, like, I wake up one morning and I check, you know, I'm checking their Twitters. | ||
| And, uh, there was a blog post and they said, uh, about that fags can't repent sign. | ||
| And I was like, oh my God. | ||
| So I, like, opened the blog post and it's, uh, for the first time ever, they had publicly disavowed a sign and using the same Bible verses that I had been. | ||
| And I know this is like a very small point in the grand scheme of things. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that's, that's reason. | ||
| That's critical reasoning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| But, like, so this is the goal, right? | ||
| So, like, knowing... | ||
| This is, like... | ||
| Do you know the story behind it? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| It was after my brother left, so I don't really know... | ||
| Nobody who's left since then. | ||
| I have two, actually, of my cousins have left since then, also. | ||
| But none of them have any understanding of, like, of what happened. | ||
| So... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not trying to take credit. | ||
| I should also say like... | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| What matters is that this idea gets into their head that what they're doing, this is not in any way the teachings of Christ. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, like, the thing is, like, some of it is. | ||
| Some of it. | ||
| Some of it is, yeah. | ||
| But, like, there's, like, huge things. | ||
| But not the God hates fag stuff. | ||
| Well, like, so it's so crazy because, like, this is something that I didn't realize until after we left also. | ||
| But, like, we thought, remember I told you about Love Thy Neighbor? | ||
| They have a sign, love thy neighbor equals rebuke, right? | ||
| Because that's in Leviticus 19. That's how it describes, you know, love. | ||
| Warning your neighbor when you see them sinning so they don't go to, you know, they have an opportunity to repent. | ||
| But the one time, like, so in the New Testament, Jesus is talking with this guy and the guy says, like, how do I inherit eternal life? | ||
| And he says, well, Jesus, what does the scripture say? | ||
| And he says, to love God and to love your neighbor. | ||
| And he says, you're right. | ||
| He says, and who is my neighbor? | ||
| And Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan. | ||
| So it's like this, do you know the story? | ||
| Um, how does it go? | ||
| It's, um, so this man, it says this man falls among thieves and they beat him and then leave him, you know, half dead. | ||
| They beat him until he's half dead or whatever. | ||
| And, you know, steal his clothes and, and leave him there. | ||
| And then it says a priest goes and sees the man and he crosses the street and walks by on the other side. | ||
| And then a Levite, who's also like dealing with the things of God, right? | ||
| He does the exact same thing, crosses and goes on his way. | ||
| Doesn't help him. | ||
| And then the Samaritan stops and binds up his wounds and puts him on his own, puts him on his own beast and takes him to an inn and gives the innkeeper money to take care of him and says, anything that you spend more than this, I'm going to, I'll pay you back when I come again. | ||
| So he's like actually practically taking care of him. | ||
| So Jesus says, and who do you think, which of these was neighbor to the man who fell among thieves? | ||
| And he said, he who has mercy on him. | ||
| So, in other words, what I'm saying is we reduced loving our neighbor to preaching, to picketing, to putting words on signs and going out and publishing them. | ||
| That's what we thought loving our neighbor was. | ||
| But the one time, the example that Jesus gives is not preaching. | ||
| The Samaritan didn't go and say, this happened to you because you're a sinner. | ||
| Repent. | ||
| He went and helped him. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so, like, where was that on our picket signs? | ||
| Where was that in your practice? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, why didn't... | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Like, why didn't we make that an issue for ourselves, like, a primary part of our theology? | ||
| And why didn't we encourage others to do it, too? | ||
| Anyway, so, again, this is something that I didn't realize until after, and I was talking to a couple of Christian friends of mine who pointed that out, and I was like, I cannot believe I missed that, like, all those years. | ||
| And what's crazy is, like, in the story, the priest and the Levite are the people who are, like, dealing with the things of God, right? | ||
| So they're presumably preaching. | ||
| Right. | ||
| that yeah so anyway there's like so many of these things that i just couldn't see when i was at the church because again you're you're in this it's it's kind of an echo chamber like clearly we had access to the outside world and we're having these discussions but the problem with that discussion is that in a lot of cases people just didn't understand what our theology actually was how we actually thought which is why you know david abbott ball making this you know | ||
| julicious like the fact that this was an ongoing conversation that he really got into the nuances of our theology and could really understand where i was coming from to be able to make the point in a way that I could understand. | ||
| And that's, I mean, I'm kind of in a position to do that with my family now. | ||
| Anybody, any of us who leaves and who understands You know Ken can try to push back in a way that's a lot more effective than people who just Don't understand where they're where they're coming from. | ||
| So you get this job Yeah, so I got a dead one my sister and I got a dead one and we were only gonna be there for a month and And then we're going to go back and Grace was going to go to school and I was going to get a job. | ||
| And then I was in Deadwood for a couple of weeks and I was like, the idea of going back to Kansas and like being back in the shadow of the church and like seeing our family all the time and like... | ||
| Seeing them and not like it's it's constantly being face to face with rejection from the people that we love the most and like the idea of going back to that environment like I my cousin was wonderful and I I love her dearly like I just couldn't go back there so like the day before we're supposed to leave Deadwood Grace decided to try out for a play there and and agreed to stay with me so we changed like all of her classes to be online and Anyway, | ||
| and we're staying with Jehovah's Witnesses, which we didn't know that when we booked it. | ||
| It was an Airbnb, our first Airbnb. | ||
| It's a beautiful old house in the Black Hills. | ||
| So yeah, they thought at first when they realized what was happening, Who we were, we start having these conversations, and then we find out they're Jehovah's Witnesses, and they thought at first that we might be disfellowshipped witnesses before they realized we were at the church. | ||
| Anyways, it was just like these insane conversations about doctrine and theology and interpretation, and it was just so mind-blowing to see that there were other ways of understanding these texts that are consistent with the text, but totally different than we understood. | ||
| Anyway, the husband, Dustin, co-owns a marketing company in Deadwood, so I took a job there part-time. | ||
| So what is your process or what's the journey from leaving the church, going to Deadwood, and then becoming sort of a self-proclaimed atheist? | ||
| How do you completely remove yourself from the shackles of ideology? | ||
| Or did you? | ||
| No, so it's, it's, um, it's definitely a, I didn't want to do, I don't think it's possible. | ||
| It's not like a switch flips and you're just everything that you knew is gone. | ||
| But you're obviously very rational. | ||
| Yeah, so it was like each time we'd be presented with a situation that, so like gay people or Jewish people or these Jehovah's Witnesses, it was, obviously I had the instinctive responses to their ideas. | ||
| But each time I would feel something, I would just ask myself these questions. | ||
| What am I feeling? | ||
| Why am I feeling it? | ||
| Is this just instinctive? | ||
| What is the evidence? | ||
| What makes sense? | ||
| It's sort of like having to try to reconstruct, actually look at the evidence again, starting from scratch, basically, in a lot of ways. | ||
| So each time I'm presented with these situations, it's... | ||
| Because obviously there's all these, for instance, gay people, that actually didn't take that long to change. | ||
| Because I had met a lot of gay people while I was at the church. | ||
| And after we left, and we're talking to them, and I'm like, I thought I was doing the right thing. | ||
| And I'm sorry. | ||
| I didn't intend... | ||
| To hurt you or to say hurtful things about you, I thought it was the truth. | ||
| And now I don't know what the truth is. | ||
| I don't know what I believe. | ||
| I don't know what I'm doing. | ||
| And people responded to that. | ||
| They were really understanding and empathetic in a way that I never imagined people would be. | ||
| I don't know if you've seen... | ||
| It's really hard for me still to go back and watch some of those videos because it's so... | ||
| It's I know exactly where I was coming from at the time, but it's so like the arrogance and the condescension and the certainty that we were right. | ||
| And now, of course, knowing like all the reasons why I don't believe those things. | ||
| It's a very strange, strange dynamic. | ||
| But anyway, it's like the fact that people were understanding in spite of that long history of all those things that I had said and done at the church was overwhelming and wonderful. | ||
| But anyway, my sister and I were basically putting ourselves over and over. | ||
| We hadn't been in Deadwood for very long when I got a message from David. | ||
| It was on my birthday, and I told him that we had left. | ||
| And, you know, I had stopped tweeting. | ||
| He knew something was up because I had stopped tweeting several months earlier. | ||
| And so he invited us to come to the Jewlicious Festival, which was a few weeks later. | ||
| It's like end of February or something, beginning of March. | ||
| I had protested at the Jewish Festival three years earlier, and all these negative associations and feelings about Jewish people, but realizing I don't know anything about Jewish people. | ||
| We've been protesting the synagogue in Topeka all my life, but I don't really know, other than just generally, Jews kill Jesus and reject him as the Savior, so therefore they're without hope. | ||
| But I didn't know really much about Jewish theology. | ||
| I didn't know anything about Jewish people. | ||
| I'd never really spent time with them. | ||
| So I wanted to go to the festival, my sister and I did, because we wanted to meet Jewish people and do this whole, it's this examining process. | ||
| What do we believe and why? | ||
| And we got so much light and sort of wisdom from other people, learning what they believed and why. | ||
| And then David said, yeah, but you have to speak at the festival. | ||
| And I was like... | ||
| No, no, this is not happening. | ||
| Like, I can't, I cannot imagine facing these people that I have spent so many years. | ||
| Like, I thought, I just, it just seemed impossible. | ||
| And it terrified me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| To be coming face to face with people. | ||
| And, and I hadn't even been out of the church for three months yet. | ||
| So it was, it was really scary. | ||
| But my sister was like, we're going. | ||
| Like, she, she knew that we needed to have this experience of, of like, of learning about Jewish people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And if the cost was we have to talk about it, fine. | ||
| And she also said later she knew I would do most of the talking. | ||
| So I was like, okay, fine. | ||
| So we went and we spoke there. | ||
| And then I thought, okay, that's great. | ||
| Now we're going to, like, we need to figure out, like, Grace and I kept saying, we want to do good. | ||
| That had been the motivating principle of our life, was to do good. | ||
| And now we realize we did so much damage. | ||
| And so anyway, we were trying to find a way. | ||
| We didn't know what to do. | ||
| How do you move forward from there? | ||
| And so we just didn't know. | ||
| So we were kind of drifting that whole first year. | ||
| I think a month was the longest we spent anywhere. | ||
| We went to visit ex-members of the church who were across the country. | ||
| My dad's family, who we never knew growing up because they were never part of the church. | ||
| We had seen them. | ||
| They would come visit for a few hours sometimes. | ||
| They were allowed to visit? | ||
| For a while. | ||
| But then, several years before we left, they cut off all contact with his family there also. | ||
| It had been very limited already. | ||
| So you haven't spoken to your dad either? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-mm. | |
| So you spoke to his family? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| His parents and his brother. | ||
| How do they feel about all this? | ||
| My grandmother, I called her about a month, a little over a month after we left, one of my first nights in Deadwood, and I told her we had left, and she just immediately started crying, and she said, I've been waiting for this for 30 years. | ||
| One of my older brothers had left since my dad had joined the church, is what she was saying. | ||
| My dad's parents are amazing people. | ||
| His dad was career Air Force. | ||
| He retired from the Air Force. | ||
| And they're wonderful people. | ||
| And all we could see of them was, well, they're divorced and remarried. | ||
| They're going to hell. | ||
| They're a bad influence. | ||
| And it's insane to me now to think, my grandmother has been without her son for decades. | ||
| And how painful that must be. | ||
| Like, I've only been, it's been four and a half years since I left. | ||
| And what am I going to be doing in 30 years? | ||
| Like, how am I, what is the, and I don't know. | ||
| It's a crazy journey that you've been on for just four and a half years. | ||
| It's really insane. | ||
| Really, like, when did it solidify in your head that you were going to, like, identify or, like, speak out as a non-believer? | ||
| This morning. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I mean, like, so I was actually talking to Sam about this a few months ago. | ||
| Like, because, like, there's part of me that, like, I mean, when I said a lot of people hear jerk when they hear atheist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And... | ||
| I don't use that word for myself. | ||
| Atheist? | ||
| I don't either. | ||
| And it's because it seems to bring in this idea that you're so certain. | ||
| You're certain there's no God. | ||
| You mock people who are religious. | ||
| You don't like them and all this. | ||
| And I don't feel that. | ||
| And I also feel like... | ||
| I am open to evidence. | ||
| I haven't decided there is no God. | ||
| It's like, I just don't see the evidence. | ||
| And so I don't believe. | ||
| And if there is evidence, I want to know. | ||
| And again, I talk to religious people all the time and I think about theology a lot. | ||
| I just, I can't not. | ||
| It also becomes, there's a group mentality involved in atheism. | ||
| One of the reasons why I was reluctant to identify as an atheist is that so many people were asking me to identify as an atheist. | ||
| I'm like, what do you give a shit? | ||
| Why do you want me to come out? | ||
| I told you I'm not religious. | ||
| Especially the idea that there cannot be a God. | ||
| Or there cannot be any sort of a higher power and that after you die, it just ends. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that's exactly where I am. | ||
| It's not a knowing for certain that there is no God. | ||
| It's a, I just don't believe. | ||
| There's so little we know about human life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Forget about the idea of possibility of afterlife or the possibility of what consciousness is. | ||
| The possibility of what this concept that we call a soul is. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Or forget about psychedelic experiences and what do they represent? | ||
| And what do they represent when they're coming from What essentially is human neurochemistry? | ||
| There's the most potent ones, or chemicals that exist in the brain. | ||
| They're endogenous to the human body. | ||
| And what are those experiences? | ||
| And why are they so akin to religious experiences? | ||
| And why do people even believe now, especially these scholars in Jerusalem, have connected the burning bush of Moses With the acacia bush, which is a bush that's rich in psychedelic chemicals, and they think that it's entirely possible that Moses had a psychedelic experience in which he came back with all the laws that human beings are supposed to be living as proclaimed by the great spirit of the universe, or whatever the hell he encountered. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| But this idea that people love to say, God is dead, there is no God, that's just as silly as saying there is one. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this is why, like, the whole process since we left, like, it wasn't a, like, I mean, first of all, like, the idea of choosing another belief system, like, I would, like, learn all this stuff about Jehovah's Witnesses, and I'm like, like, okay, yeah, that's mostly internally consistent. | ||
| Like, I think there's a lot of, I never was, like, tempted to join them or whatever, and I should say, they're actually... | ||
| They're not witnesses anymore. | ||
| They're not? | ||
| Yeah, they left a little over a couple years ago. | ||
| Oh, they left too, huh? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Do you think that you guys leaving and having these intimate conversations with them in their home might have had something to do with that? | ||
| We're still really good friends with them. | ||
| They're some of my best friends. | ||
| I don't think that it was that direct of a thing. | ||
| But it was a part of the whole journey? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think so. | ||
| Like, we would have these long conversations, and actually, it was the craziest thing when I found out, like, that they had left. | ||
| Like, it was Dustin and Laura, other names. | ||
| Laura, it was her birthday. | ||
| And they don't, Jehovah's Witnesses don't celebrate birthdays. | ||
| Like, I was talking on the phone, and I didn't even know it was her birthday. | ||
| It's like, I was, we were talking on the phone for, like, over an hour, and I was, like, telling her about all this, all these things that I'd been thinking about, and, like, and then at the end of the conversation, she was like, She's like, well, it's my birthday today, and I'm celebrating it. | ||
| And I just, like, was shocked. | ||
| I didn't say anything for a couple seconds. | ||
| Because I obviously, like, knowing what that... | ||
| And it was different. | ||
| It wasn't as, like, as much for them, you know? | ||
| Like, it wasn't the same level. | ||
| But, like, I know the... | ||
| Disorientation and the loss and all that. | ||
| It's complicated. | ||
| You don't want to just be like, oh my gosh, I'm so glad you're out of this because I think they believe some things that are really kind of nuts. | ||
| So I was just very cautious. | ||
| I don't know what happened, but just know that I've always loved and cared about them. | ||
| But I was so eager to have these conversations, to understand what had happened with them. | ||
| And it's kind of just following the... | ||
| How much internal inconsistency, like when you were saying earlier about the whole idea about the Bible being the infallible Word of God, and like, oh, that's a neat trick. | ||
| There's no way you can argue around that. | ||
| This is why, like, it's, I think, internal inconsistency, like, in the doctrines themselves. | ||
| Like, that seems to be a really important way to get in, to get through that, like, to argue. | ||
| Plant the seed of doubt. | ||
| Yeah, because it's finding the inconsistency in these two beliefs that allows you to maybe question the bigger things, the bigger principles. | ||
| And anyway, I think it's important to ask the questions. | ||
| No matter what you believe, it's important to question and to always be looking and examining for new evidence. | ||
| Because you talk about this a lot, but confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, these things that keep us locked into these belief systems and impervious to change, or not even impervious, but like Like, resistant to it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We want to be, like, open, and so this is... | ||
| I mean, I still try to do this, and this is why, like... | ||
| But do you ever want to, like, grab your mom and go, you've got to listen to me for an hour. | ||
| Just let's talk. | ||
| I would if she... | ||
| I would love to talk to her if she would listen to me, but she... | ||
| She just won't even look at you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Like, if you knocked on the door and rang your doorbell... | ||
| That's happened a couple times. | ||
| Not me, my sister. | ||
| And they close the curtain, the window, and turn off the lights inside. | ||
| That happened once. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, they won't. | ||
| Do you think it's possible she might hear this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She would listen to this? | ||
| I think it's possible. | ||
| I mean, I think somebody at the church will listen to it for sure. | ||
| I mean, so this is the thing, like when people leave, like everything that we say, any of us who leave, that we say and do publicly, the church pays very close attention to it. | ||
| Like when I was at the church, I did the same thing. | ||
| And partly it's needing to know what they're saying so that you can have a good explanation, so you can counter it effectively. | ||
| It's a game. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're scoring points. | |
| So this is another reason why it became evident that... | ||
| I couldn't hide forever. | ||
| Following the rules, pretending like none of this happened, not causing any waves for the church, that doesn't change anything. | ||
| The only thing that helps is talking about it. | ||
| Because here's the other thing, even if I privately, in letters, things that I sent to my parents or other church members, they're probably not going to share those with my siblings. | ||
| And if they do, it's going to be with a whole bunch of You know words against me at the same time so like it's it's but only by talking publicly can you You know that's how they can actually see who you really are and what you really think and what you've really gone through without the filter of Look at what these whores are doing right things like that like it's It's a do you think your kids or your your brothers and sisters are gonna hear this? | ||
| I think some of them definitely might Definitely might Do you have hope that they'll eventually bolt? | ||
| I do. | ||
| I hope that they can hear the reasoning and see the consequences of what they're doing for other people and that a lot of it, I mean, is unscriptural. | ||
| And so even by their own understanding, there are things that contradict them. | ||
| I hope that they change their minds. | ||
| And at the very least, I hope that the church continues to moderate, to not be so... | ||
| A lot of their new signs are things like... | ||
| Another one of the big things for me was imprecatory prayer, right? | ||
| Which is this idea of... | ||
| What is the word? | ||
| Imprecatory. | ||
| Imprecatory? | ||
| I've never heard of that word. | ||
| So it's like praying for curses for your enemies, right? | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So we did this... | ||
| You pray to curse against your enemies? | ||
| Often. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Often. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow, that seems incredibly non-Christian. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| But there's a, like David, King David. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| It's Old Testament though, right? | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Well, see, this is the thing. | ||
| So like, you know, we took that as an example for us. | ||
| So he prayed for his enemies, for their children to be fatherless and for their wives to be widows. | ||
| And so he's, you know, praying for God to do all these, you know, bad things to them. | ||
| Is that the Romans? | ||
| He was praying against the Romans? | ||
| No, it was David. | ||
| Philistines. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And Saul, I guess. | ||
| So we took that as an example. | ||
| So his example of him praying against his enemies. | ||
| So after we left, I contacted my dad and talked about this problem. | ||
| So David also had a lot of wives, but we don't take his example. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| As that men should have many wives. | ||
| Yeah, what about that? | ||
| And why? | ||
| Well, it's because it contradicts what Jesus and the Apostle Paul said about marriage, being one man, one woman for life, right? | ||
| That's the new way. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So, and Jesus and Paul both also said, they talked about loving your enemies, bless them that curse you and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you. | ||
| So you're supposed to be praying for the good of your enemies, right? | ||
| And so it's, it's, it's a contradiction. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so... | ||
| Anyway, it's another like a long time. | ||
| Like there's been like a bunch of sermons. | ||
| Like so now my grandfather passed away three years ago. | ||
| And so now there's eight elders and they're the eight pastors. | ||
| And my dad is one of them. | ||
| So there's been a series of sermons on imprecatory prayer since then, and it seems so confused, because on the one hand, they're still kind of justifying it, but also it just seems like you're trying to reconcile things that aren't reconcilable. | ||
| So they stopped, I should say. | ||
| There used to be a flyer that went out every Friday, and it used to say, like, thank God for 15 dead soldiers. | ||
| We pray for 15,000 more. | ||
| And so it would list all the soldiers who had died that week. | ||
| And after eight months, my dad gave a sermon about imprecatory prayer. | ||
| At the time, when I first said that, he put out a video news explaining why imprecatory prayer is the thing, and it's supported by the Bible. | ||
| Eight months pass, he gives a sermon about loving your enemies. | ||
| Within a couple weeks, that flyer was changed, and now it doesn't say that we pray for 15,000 more. | ||
| I haven't seen the... | ||
| What's the first part? | ||
| Is the first part still... | ||
| Thank God. | ||
| So they say, because God is sovereign, you have to thank him for everything. | ||
| So the fact that these... | ||
| So it's still thank God for 15 dead soldiers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So the second part. | ||
| What I'm just trying to say is there has been some moderation. | ||
| Adjustment. | ||
| And a lot of the new signs are things like, be reconciled to God and Christ our hope, things like that, that are not God hates fags. | ||
| I think that's improvement at the very least, even though there are still obviously these harsh things as well. | ||
| So there's some adjustment and some consideration. | ||
| So you don't talk to your dad anymore either, right? | ||
| No one? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Wow. | ||
| Is there anything that you think that you can do other than continuing to speak and continuing to do what you're doing that's going to reach them? | ||
| So, I mean, I'm almost finished writing a book. | ||
| I'm nearing the... | ||
| Is it a book to them? | ||
| It is both for them and also for other people. | ||
| There's part of the... | ||
| So that's kind of what I was getting at. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's like you writing a book, like letters to my mom and dad. | ||
| So it's not written quite that way. | ||
| I actually did consider doing it that way, but I eventually ended up... | ||
| Right now it's based on... | ||
| Each chapter is based on a relationship that sort of brings us... | ||
| It starts with my mother and then my grandfather and... | ||
| Sort of, like, coming into this ideology and then the process of all the, like, the mental machinations of leaving and, like, how my mind changed over time and then what's happened since we left. | ||
| And I hope that by, you know, for my family, I hope that by articulating these things in... | ||
| Obviously, we're sitting here and even if we talk for however many hours, there's only so much that it's not the same as having it written in a way that's hopefully very clear and... | ||
| And just honest to the experience, like, in as much detail and clarity, with as much detail and clarity as possible. | ||
| Like, I think that that's... | ||
| I hope that that will be effective in at least showing them that there's a different way. | ||
| There are other ways of understanding these things. | ||
| And so I do hope that... | ||
| I guess I also hope, like, in my TED Talk, I... I feel really hesitant about trying to teach anybody anything at this point. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Because I spent my whole life telling other people how to live and now to be like... | ||
| Well, you guys, no, I got this. | ||
| Now I got this. | ||
| The idea of insinuating, even, in any way that I have something to tell people about anything. | ||
| I really don't like that idea at all. | ||
| And the only reason I did the... | ||
| John Ronson, actually, is the one who reached out to me about doing it. | ||
| It was a thing that he was curating, an event that he was curating. | ||
| And... | ||
| And so I wrote the first draft of the talk and the curators, you know, came back afterwards and was like, well, it's like, this is... | ||
| How can we avoid the mistakes that you made? | ||
| And so, like, I went back and, like, took examples from David and my husband and the way that people on Twitter engage me that actually helped change things. | ||
| So it's not explicit in that way in the book. | ||
| But I hope that just by talking about this and telling the stories, like... | ||
| When I read accounts of people who have gone through similar situations, it's so helpful to me to realize that my family, yes, their activities are extreme and they manifest themselves in very strange ways to most people, but they're very common, very human flaws. | ||
| And if anything, if I talk about this in a way that helps other people see it in their own lives or that will resonate with people who have gone through similar things, I want to do that. | ||
| I want to do as much good with these experiences as I can, just because that's how my parents raised me, honestly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Their argument, of course, would be, you know, you were so right and so convinced when you were with the church. | ||
| Now you're so right and so convinced now that you're outside the church. | ||
| How do you know you're right now? | ||
| So the latter, it's not the same. | ||
| It's not the same at all. | ||
| Like, I'm not... | ||
| I do not walk through the world with that sense of certainty in my position and righteousness of my position. | ||
| I'm asking questions and I'm trying to explain why I believe differently now than I did. | ||
| I'm still asking the questions. | ||
| I never stop. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's such a fundamentally different way of engaging the world. | ||
| I do know what you mean. | ||
| But if I was on their side and I was trying to pick holes in your statement, which is what they seem to do, right? | ||
| If they're listening to the things you say, they're listening to the things you say so they can counter them with some sort of a Bible quote or some sort of a more articulate opinion. | ||
| If I was listening, I would say, you were so convinced when you were with us, now you're so convinced, but now you don't even have God. | ||
| So how could you be right? | ||
| So the thing is... | ||
| You're deluded. | ||
| The Satan's serpent scales are covering your eyes. | ||
| Don't they say shit like that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| This is another one of the paradoxes that I realized before I left. | ||
| So there's this verse, and again, this is one that my mom would quote all the time growing up, and with such urgency, like she needed us to understand this. | ||
| And the verse is, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, and who can know it? | ||
| Right? | ||
| So... | ||
| I thought the heart was good. | ||
| Home is what the heart is? | ||
| No. | ||
| I thought heart is like people being sweet. | ||
| And so the human heart is inherently, and according to the church, is inherently deceitful, right? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But the problem is they also talk about the heart as being like, that's how we know that the Bible is true. | ||
| It's because God puts an unction on our hearts. | ||
| Your deceitful little heart. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| So you're, at the end of the day, It's always our own hearts. | ||
| It's our hearts that say, okay, well, I'm going to follow the Bible no matter what. | ||
| In other words, at the end of the day, each one of us is always making a decision. | ||
| It's just that for them, they think that outsourcing it and saying that, oh, no, it's the Bible. | ||
| It's like, well, it's your... | ||
| I tried to articulate this on when I did Sam Harris' show a couple years ago. | ||
| I read it actually in his book. | ||
| That's what helps me. | ||
| It's your own moral impulses that are authenticating the truth of the Bible. | ||
| So at the end of the day, it's still you. | ||
| It's still your judgment. | ||
| The judgment of your own deceitful heart. | ||
| So, again, from their perspective. | ||
| So, I guess what I'm saying now is, like, I'm not, when I talk to my family, when I'm addressing them, like, it's with these questions. | ||
| Like, I know how you understand these verses, but what about these things that contradict them? | ||
| I'm not saying, you're wrong. | ||
| I'm saying, I can't see how you're right because of these verses. | ||
| Like, how do you do this? | ||
| How do you understand this? | ||
| And what about verses that contradict other verses in the Bible? | ||
| The church doesn't believe that those contradictions exist. | ||
| So when you talk about those contradictions, which are pretty clear, what do they say? | ||
| Well, so, the- Lord works mysterious ways! | ||
| Goodnight, kids! | ||
| Right, there's always that, like, if you think there's, like, for instance, like, back to the, like, free will, sorry, the predestination thing, that God designing people to go to hell and then holding them responsible. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| So, this is a contradiction, right? | ||
| This is the idea that you are responsible, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Man's responsibility and God's sovereignty. | ||
| They don't go together, right? | ||
| Such an awesome quote. | ||
| Can you say that quote again? | ||
| Man's, sorry, man's responsibility and God's sovereignty, they do not go together. | ||
| Right, but the quote in the Bible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I'm sorry. | |
| The way it's phrased? | ||
| Oh, which, the name it, O man, who art thou that replies against God? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| Shall the thing form say to him that formed it, why hast thou made me thus? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| So, it's that, those ideas are inherently, they're inconsistent, right? | ||
| They're contradictions. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so, Gramps, I remember one day in church, he was… Because you call him Gramps? | ||
| Gramps, yeah. | ||
| Sounds like such a cute name. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's great. | |
| Such an evil old dude. | ||
| Well, I'm sure he's not evil. | ||
| He could be so funny. | ||
| He is your grandpa. | ||
| It's so funny. | ||
| He could be funny? | ||
| Oh, hilarious. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Was he a sweet guy to his family? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very sweet. | |
| He would sing this song from the 40s and call us my great big beautiful doll. | ||
| That's what he would call us. | ||
| Love bug. | ||
| So you miss him? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You didn't get to see him before he died because you left. | ||
| I can't talk about that. | ||
| You can't? | ||
| I can't. | ||
| Not unless you want me to start crying. | ||
| I won't do it. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| I thought that was like a legal reason. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| That's just that deep. | ||
| For all the stuff you talked about. | ||
| You can't talk to your dad. | ||
| You can't talk to your mom. | ||
| But something about your grandpa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's special. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'll tell you later. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But in the eyes of most people, he was the booming voice of hate. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And I totally understand it. | ||
| Isn't that so fascinating, though, that you could see someone in an intimate way, you love them, their family, you get to see all the positive aspects of them, and yet you get to see this venom that he spews out to all the world and that also represents you guys and your family and your ideology and you're behind this Powerful leader. | ||
| He's the founder of all this, right? | ||
| So essentially, he's the man who created the very bars that imprison your family right now. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And this is one of the things, you know, after I left, like, thinking about, like, how did we get here? | ||
| You know, how did we end up in this place? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's an understanding of psychology, or a lack of. | ||
| The problem with any sort of ideology, rigid ideologies that are backed up by a deity, is that there can be no questioning. | ||
| And as soon as there can be no questioning, you're talking about human language. | ||
| You're talking about something that came obviously from the words of human beings. | ||
| They wrote those words down, they put them somewhere, and now you're reinforcing this ideology. | ||
| Anyone with even a basic understanding of how easily influenced people are and about our alpha male chimpanzee history or lower primate history, we know that we're incredibly susceptible to influence. | ||
| Incredibly susceptible to the whims of the group mindset and that this is imperative for survival. | ||
| These tribal instincts that we have imperative for survival and the reason why we made it to 2017 and that these play against us in the in forms of ideology and these very rigidly reinforced behavior patterns. | ||
| I mean, when the problem becomes atheism versus people who are deists or people who are Christian or Muslim or whatever the fuck it is, it has nothing to do with that, honestly. | ||
| It's just about mind and about humans and about our inherent tendency to give into these predetermined patterns of behavior to give us comfort in these patterns. | ||
| Yeah, there is so much comfort in certainty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I mean, it could be really frustrating, sometimes all the rules and, like you said, very rigid. | ||
| But after when I left, the uncertainty was just this enormous weight. | ||
| Like, I had no idea. | ||
| Enormous weight on you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right, all of a sudden. | ||
| Yeah, because like, again, well, one, first of all, like, one of the things that makes doing things like this hard or like speaking publicly at all now that it's not like me, like with God on my side or whatever is the idea like, now I'm standing on my own two feet, like it's my own ideas and like, I'm standing on my own two feet. | ||
| And like, who the hell am I? | ||
| You know, just that the sense of like self-doubt and uncertainty and and like it's it's just it's it's it can be crippling sometimes. | ||
| But but you just you have to keep going and keep asking the questions. | ||
| This is one of the things, like you said, another reason I don't like to call myself an atheist or to call myself anything. | ||
| Actually, Sam, sorry, I cannot stop talking about Sam Harris. | ||
| But he had this video where he was saying, we shouldn't call ourselves atheists or secularists or humanists. | ||
| We shouldn't call ourselves anything. | ||
| We should just be good, decent people living in the world and challenging bad ideas wherever we find them. | ||
| It's not about the... | ||
| I mean, we want an identity. | ||
| People crave identity and belonging in this... | ||
| In-group, like when you're talking about Gramps, like how much goodness I got to see in him that people on the outside never saw. | ||
| It's because of that in-group, out-group mentality, like I said earlier, the bonds that are forged there. | ||
| It's so enticing, but it comes at a huge cost. | ||
| And I didn't see that cost for a long time. | ||
| So now this is another reason I just don't like those labels. | ||
| It's not about the identity. | ||
| It's just about trying to find the best way we can to live in the world and do as much good as we can. | ||
| I think there are bumps in the road in the evolution of culture. | ||
| I think that's what they are. | ||
| I just think we haven't figured out how dangerous they are and that we fall prey to them. | ||
| But they're also the reason why we got here in the first place, because we did figure out these ways to bond together. | ||
| We did figure out these ways to identify with each other in this very extreme and very personal way. | ||
| And if it wasn't for those things, who knows if we would have ever made it this far. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| People have been able to rationalize horrific acts through the use of this us versus them. | ||
| Our group versus the other. | ||
| It's a very strange aspect of what I believe is the adolescent nature of human Social and cultural evolution, which is where we're at right now. | ||
| We've come so far, we think, but really we haven't. | ||
| We haven't really been around that long. | ||
| I mean, they were talking about this modern human being they found 300,000 years ago. | ||
| God, that's a blip blip. | ||
| It's a blink of an eye in terms of the history of the world, never mind the history of the universe. | ||
| And I think that it's very dangerous when someone tells you they know. | ||
| It's very dangerous because you don't know. | ||
| And so you're like, well, if they know, I'll just listen to them. | ||
| And that's what we've been doing forever. | ||
| And I think people are recognizing more and more now that that's not safe. | ||
| It's dangerous. | ||
| And it's an impediment to progress. | ||
| Personal progress, progress as a community. | ||
| We have just this insane instinct to join teams to the point where people, they identify with certain patches of dirt. | ||
| I'm a Texan! | ||
| Like, oh, you're a Texan, so this is all okay. | ||
| You know, hey, I'm from New York. | ||
| Oh, you're from New York? | ||
| Well, I get you now. | ||
| I understand you. | ||
| You're in this nice little category. | ||
| You get to operate on these predetermined patterns now. | ||
| You don't even have to have your own beliefs. | ||
| You just adopt a conglomeration of beliefs that fit whatever category you fall into, whether you're a left-wing progressive or a right-wing conservative. | ||
| We're really weird. | ||
| We're a really weird monkey. | ||
| We're so strange. | ||
| And we're also aware how weird we are. | ||
| I was going to say, that's where I feel so much and why I feel so much hope, right? | ||
| Because the more awareness we have, the better we can go about trying to shore those things up. | ||
| See the pitfalls and then try to find ways around them. | ||
| But it takes people like you that are incredibly courageous that break out of the pattern and just paddle out into the waters of discomfort. | ||
| Because that's what people have a really hard time doing. | ||
| People have a really hard time changing. | ||
| They have a really hard time taking chances. | ||
| They have a really hard time doing new things. | ||
| And you did all of it at once in one big burst. | ||
| And you separated from your tribe. | ||
| It was so important to you that you separated from your tribe. | ||
| That's so hard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| But it's, this is one of those things where like, I mean, I was talking to David, after I left, before the Julicious Festival, we were sitting in the home of this rabbi that I had protested earlier. | ||
| And your rabbi is a whore was the sign my sister held. | ||
| And like, oh, like living with this rabbi, right? | ||
| Like, actually, that's what I'm staying with here while I'm here. | ||
| You stay with a rabbi? | ||
| Yeah, a rabbi and his wife and their four kids. | ||
| How is a rabbi a whore? | ||
| You pay them and they make you feel good. | ||
| Like they tell you what you want to hear because you pay them. | ||
| Oh God, that makes them a whore? | ||
| In that case, is a comedian a whore too? | ||
| I must be a whore. | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| Probably, yeah. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| It's whoredom. | ||
| It's prostitution. | ||
| What do people give massages? | ||
| Whores? | ||
| I wouldn't go there well they're making you feel good you pay them Well, it's lying to you. | ||
| It's lying to you. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So chiropractors would be whores. | ||
| Is that how it would work? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| But David was like, you are your parents' children. | ||
| I'm just sitting there bawling. | ||
| Because I felt like such a betrayer. | ||
| This was right after we left. | ||
| And I said, what do you mean? | ||
| He said, well, they're the ones who taught you to stand up for what you believe in, no matter what it costs you. | ||
| And so I love that idea that there's still so much from home that I have held on to and that still guides me. | ||
| It's just that I obviously had to, it's just the things that I now think are destructive and hurtful and just not true, not consistent with reality. | ||
| But that gave me a lot of hope. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, you definitely seek comfort in ancient wisdom and quotes. | ||
| Who, me? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's hard. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| I remember there's a New Yorker article that came out at the end of 2015. And so I was doing interviews with the writer Adrian Chin, who's amazing. | ||
| And he's an amazing writer, just generally, not just that article. | ||
| And so we're having these conversations. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think we spent three days together in Kansas talking for maybe six hours at a time. | ||
| And then on the phone, three- and four-hour conversations regularly. | ||
| It was so much, trying to really get across all of this, trying to really understand exactly how my mind changed and all the details in the church and whatever. | ||
| And at one point, we're talking. | ||
| question. | ||
| It was about the soldier's funeral, I think. | ||
| And then I just immediately started like quoting all these verses and like, it's like, whoa, you just went into this mode. | ||
| Like I can tell this is just like this, like switching into this, like, like, like it had been at the church. | ||
| Like, it's just not possible. | ||
| Like, even though I think that I don't believe the Bible is the infallible word of God, but like, I spent so much time like reading it and learning it and memorizing, you know, chapters at a time with my family and all this stuff. | ||
| So So it's like, it's right there. | ||
| It's always like, and there, like I said, there's so much good in it. | ||
| So it's like, I, I don't know. | ||
| It's just, I know what you're saying. | ||
| It's comforting. | ||
| When you said it sounds so foreign to hear the King James, but like to me, it was just, sorry. | ||
| It's comforting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's familiar and it's a part of my home and my upbringing that I can keep. | ||
| As a person outside of it, looking at it, when someone starts spouting out biblical phrases and terms and using these parables and using these stories and passages in the Bible to justify things, And then equating, like, certain aspects of modern thinking and behavior to those things. | ||
| To me, it's almost like I'm looking at mathematics that I don't totally understand. | ||
| It's like, I see what you're doing. | ||
| You're plugging this equation in to achieve a desired result, and this result is a peace of mind. | ||
| Peace of mind is what you're looking to attain, and you're looking to attain justification for your lifestyle and actions, and you can do so with this quote, Which is essentially like you're plugging in some sort of theoretical physics. | ||
| I mean, it's a weird stretch of what I'm saying. | ||
| What I'm saying is just like the feeling of it. | ||
| The feeling of it is like, oh, I don't like this. | ||
| Well, then you use this. | ||
| Oh, and then there's that. | ||
| Okay, it makes this. | ||
| It's all these little tools in order to operate the mind on a more harmonious frequency for your own personal satisfaction and your feeling of happiness and peace. | ||
| Like you can feel comfort in the fact that you have quoted the Bible verses that explain your behavior correctly. | ||
| You've made the noises in the right order. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And whether or not those noises make sense at all. | ||
| And then when in doubt you throw in like some Weird principle that God has a plan for everything, so fuck your doubts. | ||
| We can just stick that right in there. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| So that's like dark matter. | ||
| Well, where's all the mass? | ||
| Dark matter. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| It's an odd sort of a thing because it outsources the uncertainty and the lack of knowledge. | ||
| It's something I don't understand. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| I don't have to understand it because somebody else understands it. | ||
| Also, you're using tools. | ||
| It's also like you're using these phrases and these tools and these passages to achieve desired results internally. | ||
| As well as externally. | ||
| You're using them to comfort yourself, but you're also using them to prove your point against these others. | ||
| And that's a big part of what's going on with this whole tribalism cult-like behavior. | ||
| It's justifying your own patterns of thinking by demonizing and marginalizing other patterns of thinking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay, so this is something that I... I miss this for a long time, too. | ||
| But, like, so my grandfather, like, I think I said earlier, maybe, that Christians were some of the biggest targets of the church. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We spent so much time... | ||
| The minor differences. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| But, I mean, even, like, major differences, like the hatred of God and, you know, like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| And, you know, people going to hell for eternity and why and all these things. | ||
| Like, we spent so much time... | ||
| Gramps would... | ||
| Instead of saying... | ||
| We are the only ones who have it right. | ||
| Westboro Baptist Church is the only true church in the entire world, and I'm 100% certain of that. | ||
| It was a different strategy. | ||
| It was attacking every other version of Christianity, every other understanding of the Bible. | ||
| And it's like, by default, it's like, well, you know exactly why all these people are wrong, Methodists and Catholics and whatever. | ||
| And you can articulate chapter and verse why they're all wrong and therefore the end like it becomes clear like we are right and we are the only ones who are right and everybody else is so it's just this it's it's so frustrating yeah so frustrating it's well I hate to use the word but it just it lacks enlightenment Because it's dealing with conflict and it's dealing with finger pointing. | ||
| It's dealing with insults. | ||
| Like just the term fags. | ||
| God hates fags. | ||
| Just using that. | ||
| Like that in itself, it's just like a giant red flag showing the errors of your thinking in order to even sit down and draw this poster. | ||
| Like this is not God's approach. | ||
| If there is a God of the Bible, I mean, if there is a God that's in charge of this whole thing and he's filled with love and he has a plan for us all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| You get super emotional when you're talking about this stuff, don't you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I see you're all worked up. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| No, no, don't apologize. | ||
| It's important. | ||
| Look, I mean, it's amazing how well you keep it together without contact with your mom and your dad and your brothers and sisters, and it's been four years. | ||
| How long? | ||
| Four and a half? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Four and a half, yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow, I totally lost my train of thought there. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| You said something. | ||
| Well, I was talking about just that, the insults and this attack. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, insults. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So, like, the way... | ||
| Like, I always... | ||
| You know, we would say people don't... | ||
| It's not the method that's the problem. | ||
| It's the message. | ||
| It doesn't matter how we say the message. | ||
| People are still going to hate it. | ||
| Like, if you say, you know, God created most people to go to hell, and... | ||
| We're among the only ones going to heaven. | ||
| And sorry, suckers. | ||
| You know, like, people hate that message, right? | ||
| People hate the idea that you have to, like, follow this set of rules. | ||
| You can't just live the way you want to live. | ||
| You have to obey these ideas as we understand them. | ||
| Like, people don't like that message. | ||
| They don't want you telling them what to do. | ||
| So that's, we would always make that argument. | ||
| And then, of course, you know, after, when I was thinking about leaving, it was like, Of course it matters how you talk to people. | ||
| Of course it does. | ||
| And even the Bible talks about it. | ||
| So like, you know, in the New Testament, Paul talks about, you know, to the Jews I became as a Jew and to the Greeks as a Greek and, you know, to the weak I became as weak. | ||
| It's like the idea is like you understand your audience and who you're talking to and you're actually trying to reach them. | ||
| You're not just self-righteously, you know, proclaiming this thing and saying, get on board or you're doomed. | ||
| Like, it's, there was no, we had, and we sometimes could have those arguments one-on-one, but like, you know, when we go out to these protests, we're saying these things, and it's so provocative and inflammatory, and we knew it. | ||
| And we just did it anyway because we thought it was justified. | ||
| As long as it was true, then it didn't matter how we said it or when we said it or to whom we said it. | ||
| It was a grieving widow or a child whose father had just died or parents whose children had just died. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| It's insane to me now. | ||
| I can't... | ||
| I have a hard time, like, so much of my past, like, I know why I believed what I believed. | ||
| But sometimes that when I see these contradictions, I think, what was I thinking when we were reading these verses? | ||
| And I can't think of what they could be thinking now, except that it's just that cognitive dissonance. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Just going past it. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that sounds good. | ||
| But, like, not seeing... | ||
| There's another verse that talks about a deceived heart has turned him aside. | ||
| He can't even say, is there not a lie in my right hand? | ||
| Like, that's the feeling that I have. | ||
| Sorry, back to the, you know, quoting ancient Winston. | ||
| No, they're great. | ||
| They're great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But anyway, it's just, this is why I think it's... | ||
| I think you're uniquely qualified to sort of translate those. | ||
| And that's the thing. | ||
| That's why I keep, I mean, I want to keep asking the questions. | ||
| It's not just about, you know, I think my family feels, they feel attacked, I'm sure, when I talk about this and why I don't believe it. | ||
| And, you know, when I send these messages on Twitter, and I remember what that felt like, you know, hearing people, people that I had loved. | ||
| Speak against these doctrines and values that I held so dear. | ||
| But it's not because I'm trying to hurt them or embarrass them or humiliate them. | ||
| It's because I want to help them see. | ||
| And if I'm wrong about something, then I want to know that too. | ||
| So it's always this openness to change and to, I don't know, finding a better way. | ||
| One of the things you did that's incredibly brave is not just leave, but when you change your thinking and change, you have to admit that you fucked up. | ||
| Big time. | ||
| You have to admit that your entire life has been essentially about propagating a lie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm hmm. | |
| There was a... | ||
| I honestly... | ||
| You know Weird Al? | ||
| Yankovic? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is a song that I remember listening to as a kid. | ||
| Which song? | ||
| It was Everything You Know Is Wrong, Up Is Down, Black Is White, and Short Is Long. | ||
| And I remember in this process of, before we left, remembering that and being like, I just thought of a Weird Al song. | ||
| But yeah, that's totally what it... | ||
| Just coming to terms with... | ||
| How wrong? | ||
| How could this have been for my entire life? | ||
| And how can I possibly face this? | ||
| In my own mind, let alone to all of these people. | ||
| I did it in front of the whole world. | ||
| Anybody who'd seen all the documentaries, all the times that I had so publicly defended all these ideas, and now realizing... | ||
| How can I possibly face that? | ||
| Right, and if you were ever running for office, that's the first thing they'd go out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at Megan Phelps in 2003 and the horrible things she was saying! | |
| That's what they do, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, I think Your ability to say that you don't agree with what you used to do and you are a different person now is so important for people to hear. | ||
| It's one of the most important things I think you're saying. | ||
| Because people feel so imprisoned by their past. | ||
| It's a huge problem with human beings that we repeat... | ||
| Sort of the same patterns of behavior because even if they're wrong, there's comfort in going back to those cigarettes. | ||
| There's comfort in binge eating again. | ||
| There's comfort in gambling. | ||
| I know this. | ||
| I know this crazy rush of trying to find crack. | ||
| I'm going for it. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of weirdness in human behavior patterns. | ||
| And what you've done is not just... | ||
| Have real intellectual courage to just actually challenge your own personal thought processes and ideas and look deep into these scriptures that you've been following your whole life and find these contradictions, explore these contradictions and try to debate them, but also just to come out and say, like, I was making just big mistakes. | ||
| I think it's really hard to say, I mean, a lot of things, but two things, just for people in general. | ||
| Like, I messed up, and I don't know. | ||
| And like, we have to be able to, I mean, I think to be able to, there's so, and honestly, like, this is another thing, like, there's so much freedom in that in both of those ideas. | ||
| Like I said earlier, like certainty, there's so much comfort and certainty. | ||
| Like, you don't have to wonder, you don't have to doubt, you don't have to question. | ||
| You can just go on your way and know that what you're doing is exactly right. | ||
| And like, there's so much comfort there, but, but in my experience, it's a false certainty. | ||
| It's a false comfort because you're, you're, you're, You're going along. | ||
| If you're not examining, if you're not taking in new evidence, if you're not saying, I don't know, it's like, I don't have to have all the answers. | ||
| I can just say, I'm doing my best. | ||
| This is where I'm at now. | ||
| I'm sure I'm going to find something else that I've got wrong now, and I'm going to keep trying to get better. | ||
| You don't want to become this static. | ||
| You want to be able to grow and learn and understand and do better in as many ways as you can. | ||
| You're wrestling constantly with a dangerous and volatile factor. | ||
| That's uncertainty. | ||
| And people try to avoid that sucker as much as they can. | ||
| Like, I don't want that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Just like learning to be comfortable there. | ||
| Like, I exist here and I exist in this uncertain space because it's honest. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't have to know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I can keep trying to understand and, you know, so it's... | ||
| That's why one of the most the weakest things you can ever see in a person is a person talking about something in a way where like like you ask them a question about something and they don't really know and They try to pretend they do start to pontificate. | ||
| Yeah, well you see it instead of saying god. | ||
| I don't know is that true instead or instead of being Like open to the possibility of anything being outside of the realm of their understanding, they double down. | ||
| They double down on their ignorance or they avoid it at all costs. | ||
| And you see, literally see like the little, the man in the machinery, the ego, just yanking on the gears frantically. | ||
| You can see it. | ||
| We all recognize it. | ||
| It's one of the more fascinating things to me about religion in general is that we have this incredible desire to become a part of a group. | ||
| I mean, everybody does. | ||
| We find comfort in these groups. | ||
| But we also can see the gears spinning when someone does agree with something or someone does say something that resonates or when someone says something that's contradictory. | ||
| We see the gears spinning. | ||
| We recognize that this is all some sort of a weird cognitive dance that we're doing to try to make Make sense out of this temporary existence on a planet hurling through infinity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| It's insane. | ||
| Yeah, but it's human. | ||
| And it's the human of today. | ||
| It's the human where we find ourselves existing and communicating that clearly is on some sort of path, some sort of weird path of progress and of innovation and of understanding that we're in the middle of. | ||
| We're in the middle of this storm of understanding. | ||
| And it's happening clearly in your own life. | ||
| And you're living it out in front of the whole world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And on that note... | ||
| Yeah, maybe it's a good way to wrap it up. | ||
| We did already two hours and 45 minutes, believe it or not. | ||
| Yeah, just flew by. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You're a brave person. | ||
| And I think it's really important what you're doing. | ||
| It's massive. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It's super hard to do, I'm sure. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And the fact that Twitter is what started it all off. | ||
| I love Twitter so much. | ||
| I just, I cannot. | ||
| Even what you were saying earlier about like, oh, there's only 140 characters. | ||
| Don't diss Twitter! | ||
| But Here's the thing. | ||
| It's so crazy. | ||
| Twitter, the fact that it's only 140 characters, nothing taught me how to be more... | ||
| I'm very... | ||
| I'm verbose. | ||
| I talk a lot. | ||
| But in writing, and I do the same thing in writing, but on Twitter, it taught me to distill my ideas and become concise. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And it stopped me from using... | ||
| That was one of the things, one of the ways that I stopped... | ||
| Because, like, we did it so much. | ||
| Like, we would write these elaborate insults, like, responding to emails and stuff. | ||
| Because, like, obviously on email you can write as much as you want. | ||
| But, like, on Twitter, like, so it's two things. | ||
| Like, one, it's only 140 characters. | ||
| If I, like, throw in a, you idiot, like, there's no space for it. | ||
| But also, like, when I did do that, like, there's this immediate feedback loop that you get. | ||
| So, like, you can watch the conversation derail in real time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you realize, like, okay, no, I just need to not, like, because instead of, like, addressing the arguments, like, then you're saying, like, you know, you don't know me. | ||
| They just, you know, they'll answer. | ||
| And, like, it just, it stops. | ||
| Anyway, it stops the conversation. | ||
| Like, you want it to be about the points. | ||
| I learned so much about communication from Twitter, and I just love it so much. | ||
| Like, it's just a tool. | ||
| Like, it depends on how we use it. | ||
| I use it a lot, and I learn a lot of things on it. | ||
| I mean, I'm constantly being sent articles, and that's where I found out about the 300,000-year-old human. | ||
| I mean, every day someone sends me something and I retweet it. | ||
| And that's how we got connected. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| So there you go. | ||
| More Twitter. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Your book is coming out when? | ||
| I don't know yet. | ||
| I'm finishing the last draft. | ||
| I'm not even going to tell you the name right now because I really want a different name. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Don't tell me. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not going to tell you. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| What did you say, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Okay. | ||
| If people want to see more of your stuff, I know you have a TED Talk that's out there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| My Twitter account is just Megan Phelps. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Well, yeah, there's going to be the book, but... | ||
| Well, when the book comes out, come back on again. | ||
| We'll do it again. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And we'll tweet out your book and let everybody know. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| And I really enjoyed this conversation. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you for being so brave, too. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It was huge. | ||
| What you've done is huge. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| For a lot of people listening, too. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Thanks, everybody. | ||
| See you tomorrow. |
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