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Jan. 18, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:02
2591 Breaking Free From Religion - A Conversation with Seth Andrews from The Thinking Atheist
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Hi, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
Well, he's back.
It took him a while, but this is my second conversation with Seth Andrews, host of a channel that you really have to check out on YouTube called The Thinking Atheist, a nice pacifist, non-controversial title.
And so thanks so much, Seth, for taking the time to have a chat today.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Thanks for the invitation.
Now for my listeners, we got a whole bunch of new ones recently.
The story of how you came to be where you are, as far as atheism, theism goes, I think is gripping enough for a miniseries starring Sybil Shepard as you.
But if you could give my listeners just a bit of a background as to how you came to be here, because I remember it kind of blew my mind when I first heard it, and I'm sure it'll do the same again.
Well, it's funny.
The first time we spoke, I actually hadn't shown my face.
In fact, I think we supered in the logo over my face because I was still in the closet.
I still had not yet come out.
And I was in a point in my life when it might affect me personally and or professionally.
And so I'd sort of been playing chess, not checkers.
And obviously we're past that point.
But the CliffsNotes version of my story is that I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home.
Christian school, spokesperson for Youth for Christ when I was a teenager.
I was a Christian broadcaster for a dozen years on one of the top contemporary Christian radio stations in the USA, and it took me a long time to finally sort of Come to my senses and start demanding good answers to my questions about my faith.
We were taught faith is a virtue.
Take it on faith.
Don't ask too many questions.
You don't understand the mind of God.
You can't figure God out.
Just roll with it and stop being such a pain.
And finally, I decided, no, I'm going to get to the bottom of this.
And obviously, when you read the Bible objectively, and then you start looking at other world religions next to your religion and see the similarities, and you start looking at history and science and cosmology and even morality and ethics, you realize that, well, at least for me, I could no longer hold to religion.
And so, as a video producer and longtime broadcaster, I decided then to start using my abilities To perhaps help others in their journey out of superstition, away from delusion, away from all this thing, this religious stuff that I think is holding us back as a species.
And so I started The Thinking Atheist in 2009 as an encouragement.
I'm not the thinking atheist, right?
It's an idea that we should all be thinkers.
We should always have brain engaged.
We should always be asking questions.
And if someone says, don't ever ask this question, we should especially ask that question.
And that and the radio show have really exploded over the past four or some years.
It has become one of the great joys of my life.
And it's something that has, I believe, resonated with others as well.
So that's tremendously gratifying to me.
Yeah.
Now, were there any particular—I mean, I'm sure there are many vivid moments that you had— Well,
the first two years of the ThinkingAtheist.com I didn't give my name or show my face, but I felt compelled to get it out, right?
I felt like I was kind of angry that I'd been duped.
You know, my parents didn't intentionally, they weren't lying to us in the sense that they thought they were lying.
They were doing the very best they could in their culture as believers to raise a good moral Christian child.
But I was, you know, I was pretty upset.
I felt like, you know, why wasn't I introduced to, why wasn't I given critical thinking skills?
Why wasn't I allowed to grow up and see the world as it was?
Why am I insulated in the Bible bubble here?
And...
So I was – and I was worried that my religious employers might give me the ax, might find me – I know it's illegal, but I mean you have those conversations.
Will I at midlife end up without a job and a family to provide for and a mortgage to pay?
But it was in 2011.
There was an event in Tulsa, Oklahoma of all places called Free OK, the Oklahoma Free Thought Convention, and they said, would you come and speak?
And I said – Okay.
Only in a mask.
Only dressed as a ninja.
Only as a clown.
If I stand on stage, on camera, and it's released to the internet, and the cat's out of the bag, there's no going back.
And that was the day.
It was, I think, in June of 2011 that I first showed my face and took the stage, and I knew at that moment there's no going back.
This gorilla's out of its cage, and whatever happens, happens.
Right.
Well, and one of the amazing things about the internet, of course, is that the solitary nature of independent thought has been blunted somewhat.
I mean, you can find communities of like-minded thinkers, even if you're into some very unusual stuff, not that atheism is hugely unusual, but it is really great that you can work to build a community because thought is an individual...
But I think a group process, I find, you know, ideas going back and forth with other people.
To what degree has a community grown around what it is that you're doing, and how do you feel about that?
Well, that's one of the reasons I started the website to begin with, not just to produce videos and sort of exercise demons, you know, not just to try to...
Vent about all the stuff I felt I'd been duped about.
And the videos I had done originally were challenges to my faith and pretty hard challenges at that.
But it was also to have community.
I mean, in Oklahoma, which is my home state, there's a church on every half block.
Everybody's a believer.
One of the most common questions when you meet someone is, where do you go to church?
It's part of the fabric of life around here.
I'm the only non-believer in my whole, my immediate, and I think even my extended family.
And so the online community was a chance to sort of reach out and have some kind of connection to feel like I wasn't alone.
And it's been interesting to watch how others have used the internet in that way.
I get letters from all over the world, from people, not just from Christian, but even Muslim cultures and other religions.
And they are...
They are isolated, insulated.
They wish they had someone.
And so they go online and they find a sense of community, of support.
They find people who are willing to help educate them, to challenge them, to inform them, to give them a word of encouragement when no one else will.
And I think the Internet is a very valid way of finding community and even family in many instances.
And I just think it's opened the whole world up for a whole lot of people, including me.
Yeah, there was an old phrase that said, we read to feel that we are not alone.
Now I think it's we blog to feel, to know that we're not alone with feedback.
Now, one of the things that you've talked about recently, Seth, that I think is really, really important, I'll do a little brief intro to it and then get your thoughts.
Atheists will often hear, oh...
So they believe in God.
What does it really matter to you?
Why would you take away their toy?
It gives them comfort and this and that and the other.
In other words, leave people to believe things that you don't accept as a matter of courtesy or whatever they want to call it.
It's just considered kind of rude to impose critical thinking, atheist arguments on religious people.
I find that a very inhumane argument for children because one of the things that happens is that religious people focus very much on proselytizing to children.
And children, of course, are helpless and dependent and lack the critical skills, economic independence, legal independence to really go against what they're being told by their elders.
And so to me, if the idea is that it's a good thing to let other people believe what they believe, then I believe that that should be applied to religious people first.
But it's hard to imagine how religion could survive that as a principle.
And you've done a lot of work and research into how religion targets children for what I can only really call this indoctrination.
And I wonder if you could share some of those for people who aren't particularly aware of how it works.
I've got some examples from a presentation that I've been giving around the country, having been a product of the church and seen how the church targets with extreme prejudice young children.
And religious organizations are...
They are...
It's unbelievable how much...
Time, money, energy, focus they have put on the young and the vulnerable.
Get them while they're young is the name of the speech that I gave.
Here's one great example that I'll show you.
This is an actual park off of Highway 10 in Cabazon, California.
It's a religious park, but it uses dinosaurs to bring people in.
And of course, there's a gift shop in the belly of the dinosaur there.
But people come in and And they bring their young children.
Oh look, mom, dinosaurs!
And before you know it, they're being bombarded with the stories of...
The Bible and creation and pseudoscience.
In fact, one of the signs, let's see if I have it up here.
I'll show it to you.
One of the signs they have, yeah, it says this.
It says, primordial soup to the zoo to you.
Is evolution true?
So it's not a fun place with dinosaurs in it.
It's a place where they can go and attack evolution and hard science and essentially talk about their dogma.
And there are instances everywhere where they're sort of going right after the young.
They call it the 4 to 14 window because after the age of 14, they know that young people are not nearly as likely to buy into the creation tale, to buy scripture, to buy Yahweh, Jesus, whatever.
So they have to grab them before this critical age.
And so they hyper-target them in almost every way possible.
Yeah.
And that can, of course, particularly if the parents are involved and the parents biologically were kind of programmed to please our parents.
That's how we survive.
You know, the kids who didn't please their parents often didn't make it too much past the age of half a year or something like that.
So I think relying on the immature mind and relying on the biological bond and the economic and legal dependence Seems to me particularly predatory.
And, you know, we go nuts if a cigarette manufacturer appears to be targeting anybody under the age of 21 or alcohol manufacturers and so on.
But this seems to get a bit of a pass that there is this indoctrination.
Of course, you've seen Jesus Camp and the other places where they go.
The kids go to these creationist museums and they I'm basically told to chant, not even think through, but just chant responses to secular or scientific objections to the story of creation, you know, the how do you know and all that kind of stuff, which is much more appropriately directed towards faith than it is towards science.
But we seem to have a bit of a blind spot.
It's almost like We don't want to interfere in this.
Or, like, we don't really see children as worthy of our protection from this kind of, I would say, genuine attack on their capacity to reason.
And I think a lack of compassion for the victims of this kind of stuff is really quite catastrophic in society.
It's a real challenge because a parent has the right to raise their child as best they see fit, right?
To a degree.
I mean, but if they're engaging in abusive behavior, someone else must step in.
So then the conversation becomes, well, is it child abuse to teach a child False history, false science, and even worse, to threaten them with eternal torment in Hades if they don't buy into your myth.
Here's a great example of the bad science.
There's a school in Louisiana, it's a private school that's teaching children that dinosaurs and human beings coexisted, and they're saying the proof is the Loch Ness Monster, which has been spotted on sonar by small submarines.
And they say it's a plesiosaur, and they're teaching this as science.
Now, is it abusive?
To take a child and teach that child out and out lies, right?
We know this is a lie.
It is a non-truth.
It's not substantiated in any way by the evidence.
If someone sees this happening, our instinct is to step in and go, hey, yo, child, hey, get a second opinion here, man.
At the same time, you know, you've got you've got that weird, that weird sort of nebulous area where the parent does have a right to raise his or her child.
Where's that line drawn?
When is intervention appropriate?
How do you intervene?
It's a hugely complex problem.
And I myself struggle with it even in my own family.
I mean, I've got siblings who homeschool their children in religious homeschool.
So these kids believe in floating zoos and 900-year-old human beings and supermen who gain strength based on the length of their hair and curses and spells.
It's just unbelievable.
Well, I can't go in and say, hey, this is bogus.
I'm going to take over.
And my only solution has really been to live a loud, proud, secular life in full view of these young people in hopes that perhaps one day they will gain the courage and the opportunity to start asking hard questions, and maybe they'll come scratch on my door when they're 18 and say, hey, look, Seth, we want to talk to you a little bit about some of this stuff.
I don't know.
It's a pipe dream.
And I don't know where the line is drawn.
I mean, I don't know how you fall on it, Stephan, but...
It's a difficult thing when you see another parent doing something you know you're convinced is detrimental, but you cannot, and maybe you should not step in.
I don't know.
Well, that is, I mean, that is a great challenge for anyone who is really interested in the rights and protection of children.
I have sometimes intervened and I have sometimes not.
It is kind of a gut, an instinctual thing, because of course, to some degree, you're concerned about provoking the parent.
You embarrassed me, your strangers came up to me, and then you're concerned about...
I think, like, from my standpoint, we have a fairly good framework for knowing what is abusive and what is not abusive.
So telling people things that are false is not necessarily abusive.
I think it's wrong, morally wrong, but is it really abusive?
Well, I'm not exactly sure about that.
I don't really believe that it's abusive.
You can't sue me if I give you wrong directions.
You know, you ask me how to get to the mall in the car and I send you off to the zoo or something.
I mean, that's kind of jerky on my part, but it's not really abusive.
What I think, though, is that if it would be criminal for an adult, then it is abusive towards children.
I think that's fairly clear.
Now, if I as an adult, let's say I ran a home for mentally challenged people who, you know, lacked the capacity to process things rationally.
And I told them that they had to obey everything I said or invisible demons would feast on their eyeballs for, you know, at nighttime or something like that, terrified them with the most horrifying tales, which they did not because of their cognitive limitations have the ability to evaluate and judge and so on.
Well, I would go, that would be illegal.
Like that would be clearly abusive.
If I told someone that they needed to give me money, otherwise friends of mine would hurt them.
That would be extortion or something like that.
And so if I also if I promise someone a cure for an illness that didn't exist and then charge them for that cure, then that would be illegal and fraudulent as well.
So I think it's not so much that parents tell the children things that are false.
I think it's the threat that is necessary to get children to believe things that are false.
I mean, you're a parent.
I'm a parent.
Kids are incredibly empirical.
They're very rational.
And to get them to believe things that are outlandish usually requires criticism.
Either bribery or threats, and usually it's a combination of both, right?
Heaven, hell, and all that kind of stuff.
And I think the bribery, yeah, you know, I'll promise you something.
If you give me money that doesn't exist, that seems like a bit of a con.
Definitely the threats, I mean, which children take very seriously.
You've probably heard or read of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, which has the most terrifying description of hell in it that I've ever read, outside of Dostoevsky, perhaps.
But...
It is, I think, when you cross the line to providing or delivering threats towards children, and hell is certainly a threat, and it's a greater threat of damage than any adult could ever offer any other adult, then I think that would definitely cross the line into abuse.
I don't know how the lies can be sustained without the threats.
Sorry.
I get emails from all over the world.
I get people who are well into their 30s, 40s, even 50s.
And they say, I have nightmares about hell.
I was so frightened as a child.
I remember I would have a bad thought and I would immediately stop and say, Dear Lord Jesus, please forgive me.
Please forgive me.
And it's amazing how many, even in their non-belief, atheism, agnosticism, whatever, they logically have already taken the step out of mythology and they've moved on.
But there is some baggage with them that many of them have a difficult time getting over.
It's so ingrained in them.
It's the carrot and the stick, right?
Heaven and hell.
You're going to have a mansion and streets of gold and bliss and you'll be reunited with the family dog and you'll get to hang with Jesus and it'll be amazing.
What a party!
Also, if you don't buy into this, you will experience torture beyond imagination without end.
I mean, to do that to a child, I think, is psychological abuse.
I think it is something that is one of the most tragic parts of religion, beyond even the worship of ignorance.
And that's another thing I wanted to bring up that I know that is huge within the church.
They teach us Not to ask questions.
They teach us to celebrate the fact that we don't know.
And I wanted to show you, I knew this was going to come up and I brought an example, I wanted to show it to you real quick.
There's an evangelist and millionaire, not necessarily in that order, named Joyce Meyer.
She speaks all around the world.
She's a Christian evangelist and she's an author.
We just did a podcast called Sex, Money, and the Ministry that talked about the tens and tens of millions of dollars that she makes and the lavish lifestyle she leads and whatnot.
That's a whole other show.
But she's written a book.
That's targeted to teenagers and the parents of teenagers.
It's called Battlefield of the Mind for Teens.
And she has two quotes which are hugely telling about the mentality of the Christian church towards knowledge.
And here's the first one.
She said, I once asked the Lord why so many people are confused.
And he said to me, tell them to stop trying to figure everything out and they will stop being confused.
I found it absolutely true.
Reasoning and confusion go together.
And then the other quote was this.
Satan will look for your child's weakest area and attack at that point.
He'll attempt to fill your child with worry, reasoning.
The underscore is mine.
Reasoning, fear, depression and discouraging negative thoughts.
So, I mean, you've seen the church lump reasoning in with worry and fear and depression and negativity that The mind is the enemy.
Right?
That's Satan's playground.
Go with the heart.
Go with the flow.
Go with what makes you happy.
Go with what your pastor or pundit or parent or spiritual leader tells you.
But whatever you do, don't use reason.
That's a real trap door that you may fall through.
And I think that's a betrayal.
Her words are really a betrayal of the worship of ignorance that's prevalent within the church.
And there's certainly some arguments that I think are fairly compelling.
This hasn't always been the case.
I mean, they used to refer in the Middle Ages to Aristotle as the philosopher.
I mean, he's just the guy.
He's the guy you go to.
And of course, the Muslims hung on to the works of the ancient Greek philosophers throughout the Dark Ages.
And there is some hostility towards, say, the heliocentric model of the solar system from the papacy.
But a lot of the church guys were like, hey, you know, science is pretty cool.
You could really argue, starting with Martin Luther, who had a visceral, physical hatred for reason.
Like, he was a rip reason out, step on its eyeballs, shoot its young.
He was just insane against reason.
And there was a tradition of this, but it was a bit more gentle, right?
So the Middle Ages were like, they'd really tried to puzzle things out, right?
The scholastics would spend enormous amounts of time trying to figure out if Adam had a belly button.
You know, I laugh when I first heard that.
Yeah, you know, that is actually a pretty important question.
And yeah, God doesn't have a belly button.
So how can Adam have a belly button that he's not in the image of God and so on?
They're all very serious questions, but they really did try to bring reason to Scripture.
And I think with the spread of the secular translation of the Bible...
That Martin Luther provided, I think people began to go into this thicket and say, well, we can't possibly reason this out.
And I think that there was a hostility to questions or conclusions, particularly after the hundred years of religious war that racked Europe after the secular Bible came out.
And so I think there is this just, we can't go there.
Like if we go there...
Our brains explode and everything falls apart.
And I think there is a hostility towards reason now that has not always been the case.
It certainly isn't always the case in the church as a whole, but I think in American evangelism in particular, there is this just massive hostility towards reason, which I think is incredibly damaging and so hypocritical.
First thing they do when they get sick for the most part is, you know, beg for an MRI.
Well, it's not just ignorance about the world, too.
It's also ignorance about their own scriptures.
I mentioned from the stage at Skepticon, which was a big free thought event recently, there was a book by a guy named Stephen Prothero called Religious Literacy, where he went out and he I think he interviewed a thousand people, both theist and non-theist alike.
And he asked them basic questions about their own scripture, right?
So people hold the Bible to their chest and they say, the Bible is absolutely true.
It's the perfect, inerrant, divinely inspired word of God.
And they just know it.
So how much do they really know about the Bible, right?
You ask them, well, who wrote the book of Genesis?
I don't have the first clue.
Well, he did a survey where he thought, let's check the religious literacy of people, both secular and non-secular, in the United States.
And you can see by the USA, here's where we're going.
We got a real literacy problem.
Let's see.
Two-thirds of the people surveyed had no idea who gave the Sermon on the Mount.
Wait a minute.
Two-thirds?
Sorry, I've got to interrupt you.
Two-thirds of the people surveyed did not know Jesus Christ gave the sermon.
75% of the people surveyed thought that the sentence, God helps those who help themselves, is actually scripture written in the Bible.
Of course, it's not.
50% of high school seniors believe that Sodom and Gomorrah Are married.
They're a married couple.
Oh no, really?
I thought you were going to say they believe it's a video game.
10% of people thought that Noah's wife was Joan of Arc.
This is what we're up against.
That's just so wrong.
They're content.
We, as a culture, as a believer, I was content to sit back in my Sunday pew and be spoon-fed sugar every Sunday and not ask a question.
And, you know, that's a problem.
And I think when you kill the fires of curiosity in a child, it often hamstrings them for the rest of their life.
I'm just glad that one day I finally came to my senses and started tapping on the window a little bit to see if it was structurally sound.
And, of course, it wasn't.
Now, Seth, I did a video a while back ago called God is Really the Fear of Others.
I'll put forward the thesis and you can let me know what you think.
You were certainly in the religious community.
I was raised as a Protestant and I was in the choir and all that, but I was fairly young when I let go of that fantasy.
And I can't help but think that, you know, one of the challenges you face is with your family and with your parents and so on.
It's not so much that people actively believe, like, in this deity.
It's just there's such a social cost to breaking from the herd for this.
A family cost, a professional, as in your case, directly professional cost.
It's pretty uncomfortable for a lot of people.
I mean, I get emails all the time, you know, like I'm the only guy who thinks for himself in this small town and wherever, right?
And I think that that social disapproval and that social ostracism factor, as obviously very big in communities like Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons and so on, is a really powerful factor.
And I think atheists would do well to address that rather than the purely intellectual arguments.
Because in my experience, people don't particularly believe because they find the argument so compelling.
It's just, well, if I don't, You know, what happens?
All these terrible things are going to happen to my family, my friends, my marriage, my kids or whatever.
I think it's that social net that kind of keeps it going.
I don't know that atheists spend as much time as they could, I think, focusing on that and maybe finding ways to substitute whatever they lose in that arena.
And if I'm going to be fair, by the way, my employer took me aside and we had a conversation about, you know, I mean, it was boundaries were observed and they told me outright that That as much as they had a right to live their own religious worldview, I had the right to be non-religious and be as public as I wanted about it.
I mean, I won the lottery as far as that is concerned, so I must give kudos to my employer, because a lot of people will, a lot of employers will find a reason, right?
They can't fire you for your religious belief, but you had poor, quote-unquote, communication skills, or they'll find a way to get you out.
But, you know, the personal and professional consequences...
Are often so significant.
I got a letter from a teenager, 20-something.
He's in college.
He had three years of college left.
He's a sophomore.
Comes from a fundamentalist home.
His parents are true blue Baptists, I think.
And so what often happens when young people go off to college and are introduced to ideas that don't exist here in the biosphere, you know, back here in Xanadu, they get a chance to learn other things and philosophy and world religions and all the other stuff.
Well, wow, he came to a point of non-belief in religion.
And his parents actually gave him a form of not just emotional blackmail, but financial blackmail.
They said, if you don't renounce this atheism thing...
Yeah.
So what they were essentially doing is saying, think like we do, or we will do something that will quite possibly, almost certainly, alter negatively the trajectory of the rest of your life.
And I think that kind of thing is unconscionable, but it happens every single day.
And it's one of the reasons people keep their mouths shut.
You know, if my grandmother heard, she would be heartbroken.
Our relationship would be ruined.
My parents would never speak to me again.
I would lose all my friends.
And, you know, one thing that the church does well is community.
Man, they do community so much better than the nonbeliever.
And the atheists, we got some catching up.
We got some learning to do.
I don't know why we've surrendered the idea of family and community and, like, gathering.
We've just surrendered that ground to the church because— Well, if we come together as a group, we might as well be an atheist church.
When did the church get a monopoly on coming together on common ground?
You know, they don't have that.
We're relational creatures.
We should be coming together as often as we want to without apology.
If that's church, then go to Comic-Con, then that's church.
Go to a chess club, and that's church.
Go to a bowling team, that's church.
It's bogus.
We have every right, and we should be coming together, organizing, supporting each other, and giving support to those who may have lost friends or family members in their other circles.
They can sort of fill that void with free thinkers in other parts of their city and other parts of the world.
Yeah, I think that's very important.
There is a bit of a sort of prickly thing when, as you point out, if atheists do something akin to religion, then people say, ah, atheism is just another religion, which is like saying bald is just another hair color.
Now, I wonder if we could end with, if you could give the words that you would like Christian or religious parents to be, what would you like to say to them about...
The child that they're going to have, their duties, their responsibilities, and what ideally they could do with that child and the child's mind and how they should be instructed.
I had a teenager, 16-year-old, participate in the Thinking Atheist online forum.
And as I understand it, this was brought to me by an administrator, and so I know it's a legitimate thing.
But apparently this person's, this teenager's religious mother found out.
Very, very upset.
Very unhappy.
Who's running this?
I'm going to send a letter.
I think she even threatened to call the cops.
Because he's using the forum?
This is the type of alarmist mentality you're dealing with.
And I still don't even know who this lady is.
But I wrote a letter and it's just sort of a letter to all, a forum letter, kind of a Dear John letter, kind of a deal that addressed it.
And it essentially said this, that A religious parent holds precious his or her ability to own and live their own worldview.
If you go to a religious person and you say, you need to change your mind or you're broken or you're shaming us.
Well, they turn around and say, no, I have every right to believe what I believe.
It's a free country.
But then they will deny to their child the very right that they then claim for themselves.
And I always say to them a couple of things.
One, Did you raise someone who would only speak in your voice, or would you give them a voice of their own, or allow them to speak in a voice?
Must they look like you?
Must they walk like you and talk like you?
Did you raise a clone, or did you raise a child?
And the second thing I say is this.
If your God spun the cosmos into existence with the breath of omnipotence, There's nothing beyond him, nothing, nothing that will ever defeat him.
Nothing is more powerful than him.
Why would he ever be challenged or afraid of an idea?
If your God is scared of an idea, you're essentially saying your God is a weakling.
Your God is holed up in the house with the lights off, sitting in the corner, rocking back and forth.
A legitimate deity worthy of worship would welcome challenge, would welcome challenge from my forum or yours or someone else's, would say, please bring it.
Bring the questions.
Bring the challenges.
Test me.
Give me the opportunity to prove myself to you.
And if he is truly omnipotent and omniscient and worthy of worship, he can do so, so easily.
It's beyond imagination.
So I put the charge back on the parent.
If you believe your God is all-powerful, Now, does it always work?
No, but I think it places the burden on them.
Look, you need to put up or shut up.
Do you really think your God needs you mashing away on the comment section on YouTube under a pseudonym?
Do you think that that's God's master plan for defending his word?
Of course not.
He doesn't require you at all.
Let God defend himself.
And let's see.
Both cases presented in the courts with the evidence presented and see who comes out on top.
Yeah, and...
Jesus, of course, had his doubts.
God himself had his doubts in that he drowned the whole world and then said, In hindsight, that may not have been the wisest move.
I may have left the water running, gone out for a run, and so I'm going to make a rainbow to say, sorry, I'm never going to do that.
So even the deities themselves have their doubts.
Jesus says on the cross, why hast thou forsaken me?
He believes that he's left alone.
And so if the deities themselves and the sons of the deities have doubts, and that is perfectly valid to express within the faith, why is it somehow clamped down to Would they have said to Jesus, well, you're not a deity because you have doubts?
I think not.
And so if that which you worship has doubts, you cannot rationally deny the value of doubts to anyone who worships the same thing.
If God knew in advance that he would have to drown the world, why did he continue with a plan?
If he's truly omniscient and omnipotent, why couldn't he come up with a better plan?
Why was Jesus questioning the plan when he was on earth, when he was part of the plan?
Why would God require horrible torture and murder of his own, a part of himself to save us from the very hell that he himself created?
What moral God creates something like eternal torture in a fiery hell?
These questions just add upon themselves exponentially.
And I think, you know, if we're going to worship him, he needs to deliver.
He needs to come through and prove himself.
And arriving in Bronze Age Palestine 2,000 years before the invention of the video camera does not work for me.
Thank you very much.
Or at least he could have left a video camera behind, which would have been pretty strong evidence that something supernatural was going on.
Miracle of a video camera into existence, please, so we can see some miracles and see...
We're still having to debate whether or not there was a guy, even an earthly Jesus, who the myth is built upon.
I mean, this is not omniscience or omnipotence.
This is a parlor trick.
This is just crazy, you know?
It makes no sense.
Yeah, you can say, you know that hearsay that is inadmissible in court?
Well, it's called the Bible.
Okay, so I really wanted to thank you for your time.
Obviously, we could chat all night.
For my listeners, The Thinking Atheist is the YouTube channel.
Obviously, you're doing fantastic work.
I remain immensely grateful for the work that you're doing.
And for your listeners, my channel is freedomainradio.com.
We talk about all kinds of philosophy here.
Seth, I commend you in coming out.
I hope it has been a pleasant experience.
I hugely thank you for the work that you're doing.
Your books are worth reading, your videos are worth perusing, and your guests are truly stellar.
I guess you're my guest, so I'm not even praising myself there.
But thank you again so much for your time.
It's a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
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