EPISODE #900

Speaker 1: Here we go. Speaker 2: Stand by. Speaker 3: Three, two, one. Speaker 4: The thinking atheist. It's not a person. It's a symbol. An idea. Speaker 5: The population of atheists in this country is. Speaker 6: Going through the roof. Speaker 4: Rejecting faith. Pursuing knowledge. challenging the sacred if i tell.

Speaker 7: The truth it's because i tell the truth not. Speaker 5: Because i put my hand on a book and made a wish. Speaker 4: And working together for a more rational world. Speaker 1: Take the risk of thinking for yourself much more happiness truth beauty and wisdom will come to you. Speaker 7: That way assume nothing question everything and start thinking this is the thinking atheist podcast Hosted by Seth Andrews.

Speaker 1: How am I spending broadcast number 900? Well, it's been an interesting week. The cat is sick, so I'm doctoring a sick kitty. You know my family. It's Natalie and me and Linus and Gracie and cat. We spell it with a K. K-A-T-T. wasn't acting right. Now, this is not a young cat. We estimate his age to be about 16. We got him when he was 11 months old,

something like that, back in 2011. So, 16. And I know some cats can live a long, long time, like 20 or more years. But he was losing weight. He just didn't seem right. And I so desperately wish that animals could speak english and say i don't feel well and here's the problem here are my symptoms but you and i know that's not the case and cats according to the veterinarian are really good at hiding things they cover things up they compensate so you don't know but

he was losing weight wasn't eating all that much he was drinking a lake he was drinking all the time and he was throwing up twice a day What the hell's going on? Ran him to the vet and they did all the work. They took him to the back and they poked him and prodded him and they drew blood and urine and all that stuff. And they took his blood pressure. The veterinarian comes out and he says, OK, we got a UTI going on. And his blood pressure

is double what it's supposed to be. And this can cause headaches and nausea and all kinds of misery for the cat, which might explain why he's yowling and throwing up all the time. And I just felt terrible. Natalie and I were like, how long has this been going on?

How long have we not known? I mean, just the guilt still hits me right to my marrow. Weeks, months, hopefully not months or longer. So we are medicating a cat. He's going to take blood pressure medication for the rest of his life. And if you have not given medication orally to a cat, you have not lived. It is an exercise in survival. If you can give cats pills,

you could probably survive in the wild like bear grills for years. You could live off the land. You could survive animal attacks, tigers and panthers. If you can give pills to a cat, you deserve a medal of bravery.

That's what we're doing now. It's twice a day for the rest of his life. So the blood pressure is going down. The checkup says it's dropping. Medications have increased. We are watching him and we're loving on him and he's hanging out. He doesn't seem unhappy, but it's been cat hospital here at the Andrews house for the past week.

Just finished the Unholy Trinity event last week. The next big events on the horizon, two major conventions that are coming up. The Freedom from Religion Foundation National Convention in Milwaukee. That's October 16th through the 18th. I'm not speaking at that one, but they got a killer lineup. Then Rocket City Reason in Huntsville, Alabama, October 23rd through the 25th.

I will be on the opening keynote. Forrest Valkyrie is the closing keynote. keynote. So we're going to be kind of a wraparound on that Saturday. They got a bunch of cool stuff going on. Thethinkingatheist.com slash events has all that. So it's been just a juggling act. I feel like I'm playing catch up and I don't have anything amazing scheduled for show 900. I don't have some celebrity guest.

I've got a few soundbites from the last 16 years, kind of a time capsule I was browsing through just going down memory lane. But I think about It's 16 years. How many thousands upon thousands of hours are represented by these shows? You know, on top of that, with the videos and the speeches and the travel and the books and 900 shows, I've had so many people who've become my friends as guests. Talked about Forrest and Erica. and

Promise and Shannon Q and Melanie Teresa King and the Cognitive Dissonance guys and God-awful movies. They've invited me back on their show. I get to review another Christian film this fall. I'm excited about that. Noah and Heath and Eli and a Christian movie?

Speaker 8: Oh, yeah. Speaker 1: Sign me up. I'm all over that. Taken so many amazing calls from people all over the world. We've shared so many stories. I've gotten the privilege of being a storyteller, including ghost stories. That's another thing I've got to put together by mid-October, as Halloween is past approaching. I've got to get ghost stories together. I'm a little behind. I am also planning my Halloween decoration every year. I do something different. One year we did the Wizard of Oz

with a big tornado. Last year was Bone Jovi. We did a skeleton 80s band with actual instrument playing skeletons on a raised stage and Ozzy Osbourne flying overhead looking down because he had just passed away. I've done skeletons rowing an actual boat across the river Styx. I did Ghostly Prison once. We had bars and we had guards and an actual electric chair. And it had, what do

they call that, a Tesla? It's not a Tesla coil, but it was something with a lightning on a disc plate behind the chair. And then we built an actual electric chair looking thing with the straps and fake cords, electrical cords and conduit. And then the kids would come by and they'd sit in it and we'd play this.

And smoke would come out of the chair and they would writhe and carry on while people were shooting video. And it was hysterical. So this year we're doing a Western theme. Cowboys, skeletons all around the yard, and hay bales are going to be roasting marshmallows. There's going to be bats on a spit that are being cooked over the flame, fake flame. We're going to have the 10-foot skeleton be in the sheriff, a giant sheriff with a star, big badge, and chaps. We're going to make giant chaps for them. And a six-foot skeleton horse rearing up, and

another skeleton is going to have a working spinning lasso that we're going to make out of wire. And so he's going to be lassoing the horse. We're going to have the town graveyard with some funny headstone sayings on it. And then we're turning the garage into a jail. So we're going to take PVC pipe, paint them like jail bars, and the kids can come around. and with the skeletons all around, and they're going to be holding onto the bars like, let me out, and then the kids can sneak in between the skeletons and have their pictures taken.

Last year, we had 740 candy-taking trick-or-treaters. This neighborhood is mecca. Everybody comes here for candy. Maybe it's because people like me put together big displays. We're advertising that we have the goodies. So it's going to be a big one, so lots coming up anyway. I was reflecting. I was being contemplative over show 900 and all of the topics

that we've covered, you know, to try to have variety for you. I feel a sense of responsibility that we cover a host of different things so that we're not doing the book of Genesis every five minutes. You can only debunk the nativity story so often. You can only talk about this so many times. So I really mix it up. I mean, we talked about Christian movies, right, and Christian video games and We've gotten into purity culture, talked about the aliens and archaeology, the white right. We

have taken apart the nativity story and we've dissected the gospels and the conflicting accounts of Mark and Luke. We've talked about the Christians, progressives and hardliners and everybody in between. I've done shows on Darwin Awards where people did dumb stuff and paid a pretty high price. We've done shows on the Amish and the Mennonites. We've talked about the Founding Fathers. Human evolution. Where did we as human beings

come from? Erica Gutzig-Gibbon came on and for an hour walked us through. How did we become us? Fascinating stuff. The beginning of the world, right? The Big Bang. The singularity. Abiogenesis. What the hell is that? Can anybody explain it? Black holes.

Cults like Mormonism, Scientology, Jehovah's Witnesses. We've talked about the monarchy, atheist weddings, atheist funerals, biblical slavery. We've gotten into vaccines and vaccine science, molecular biology, weird history, the stories of our past that actually happened but seem kind of made up.

We've gotten into debates. Should we have debates? Do they do anything? Is it just theater or do debates change minds? The Ten Commandments being shoved into our public institutions, schools and courthouses, etc. Cretans like Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk and Marjorie Taylor Greene. We've talked about the surveillance state.

and technology. I had Professor Nita Farahani on a couple of times. We've gotten into childhood indoctrination and the ministries that churches use to target kids. American gun culture. Speaker 5: Buddhism. Speaker 1: Mindfulness meditation. We've talked about ethics and morality, the trolley problem, what would you do? We've gotten into the insurrection, UFOs, religious trauma, death with dignity, and medical aid in dying.

We've talked about alternative medicine, the Catholic Church, different fears and phobias, Fox News, our religious families, QAnon, religion and race, LGBT issues, Santa Claus. The Krampus, other Christmas traditions, the supposed war on Christmas. We've gotten into the Creation Museum.

I have literally gotten into and toured the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter and produced work on that. We've gotten into homeopathy and new atheism, the neo-Nazi, the nature of miracles, corporal punishment, the dinosaurs, faith healers, how to come out as an atheist. I mean, it's amazing. I was looking back going, hey, you did okay, man. You know, for one dude. who's been doing this for a while,

you know? And I've also been astounded at what a privilege it is to do what I do because of some of the celebrities that I've brushed up against, or at least high-profile educators. And not just the people who are teaching at the highest levels of many of our universities, like Dr. Robert Sapolsky. That was a big fish. I can't believe he said yes, as well as Dr. Franz de Waal. He passed away. I mean, a legendary, lifelong scientist.

We had a conversation. I think he had died just a couple of months later. It was remarkable. I just thought, wow, what are the chances that I was one of the last interviews he ever did John Delancey, Q, from Star Trek. He was on the show twice. I got to bump into him at the Reason Rally in 2016, and I fanboyed.

Speaker 9: Mr. Speaker 1: Delancey, I love your work. Thank you so much for being on the show. I love your stuff. And I made a point not just to talk about Q. Because I'm sure we Star Trekkers, Trekkie, we Trekkies, we like to bring up Q, and I'm sure he's cool with it.

But he's done so much other great work. He's done stage work, and he's been in various films. I loved him in Breaking Bad. He was only in one episode, part of one episode, but he was fantastic. So I tried to talk about those things. But I'm very conscious of how fanboyish I am. Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller came on the show, I guess that was 10, 12 years ago. I got to hang out with Penn Jillette?

Are you shitting me? I got to be a TV star for about eight seconds. Back in 2021, Blumhouse contacted me, a producer from Blumhouse. They were doing a television miniseries, a four-part true crime documentary called Fall River. And part of that story included the Satanic Panic. And so the producer had stumbled across my YouTube speech on the Satanic Panic, reached out and said, we want to put you on camera.

Sent a crew out, spent the day at my house, and that released on Epix on the 16th of May, 2021. I think it's streaming free on Prime. Just Google Fall River True Crime Documentary. I'm featured in episode two, and it was kind of awesome. I have spent time in reflection.

I guess that's what I have been doing. And of course, as we're doing all that, in the back of my mind, I'm thinking about the next milestone. The next milestone is show number 1,000. Speaker 5: 1,000 shows?

Speaker 1: That's a big deal for a guy like me. I know for some podcasters, it's nothing. They do shows once a day. They hit 1,000 pretty quickly. But for me, 1,000 is major. And I am considering putting together a 1,000 podcast convention. like an actual live event. We'll bring out some of the coolest people that I can get. You and your family. We're going to find an auditorium. We're going to set up the studio. We are going to do the broadcast in front of an audience of three,

four hundred and make it a big deal. So I'm doing the math. Fifty two weeks in a year. So a couple of years from now. Would you join me to commemorate show number 1-0-0-0? I'm thinking about it already.

I mean, if I'm still around, some people say. I think it was Noah Lusion when we were hosting the event in Cincinnati and he introduced me for my speech. He called me the godfather of atheist podcasting. And I remember feeling honored at the time, but I also have this thought, you know, as I age and everybody else is getting, they look younger and they're all skinnier and hotter and they have good skin and boundless enthusiasm. They can stay up all day and night and eat pizza

at every meal and they're so hungry. You know, they're just, they are, they are still a thousand percent go, go, go. And here I am aging. And I thought, well, am I going to age out of these conversations? Am I going to become the fossil? Will I become the dinosaur that they talk about? Or will I play the role of kind of the elder statesman? Well, he's a veteran.

He's been with us for a long time and he's still relevant. He still has something to offer. Or will they one day wake up, the movement will wake up and say, OK, it is time for Seth In the village, we all come together. We must send Seth to go out. You will now wander in the wilderness until you die.

You have outlived your usefulness. Thank you very much for the past two decades. Like, I've wondered, you know, are they going to say, hey, goodbye? No, I hope not. I feel like I still have something to offer. I think we all, we all have something to offer. Now, I'm going to put everybody in the Wayback Machine. I actually found this very low-quality clip from 2010 with my

first show and my first guest ever. First podcast episode. And you're going to hear a little piece of that next. Speaker 9: Next. Speaker 1: As the great philosopher Huey Lewis once sang, we're going back in time to the very first broadcast that I ever released. This was on Blog Talk Radio. I got to apologize for the quality or the lack of quality

because Blog Talk Radio, back in the early days of podcasting, did not have HD audio. The quality sucked. It was terrible. But I'd never podcasted online before, and I thought rather than try to carry the whole show by myself, I need a guest. Some people suggested a dude I had not yet met. His name was Aaron Raw, and he helped to carry broadcast number one, which released July 31st, 2010.

Check out this classic audio. Speaker 10: The Bible, much of it plagiarized, correct? Speaker 6: Oh, exactly. Speaker 11: Yes. Speaker 12: From Persian religion, from Zoroastrianism, elements seem to be from Hinduism, and then there's portions that appear to have been Egyptian in origin, but the Mesopotamian religions are almost a conglomerate.

in modern Judaism. Speaker 10: The virgin birth seems to be a common thread. Most religions of that day have some kind of a flood story. There seem to be echoes from religion to religion, from culture to culture that you can see manifest in Scripture.

Speaker 12: Yeah, I want to address the flood story thing because you hear that all the time. The flood stories that you get well outside of Iraq, of the Iraqi area, are different stories. They have different details. They involve the only people that survive are two people that hide in the clamshell, or they have other details that cannot possibly be reconciled with any element of the Noah story. Like in China, for example, there was the goddess Nukwa, who

had to come in and save the day when a warrior defeated in battle threw his spear up into the sky from the top of a mountain, and accidentally tore a hole in the firmament, which let all the water in, and then flooded the planet. Now, Nuqua was a Naga goddess.

She's a Chinese Naga goddess, and she had to dry up the flood and find a way to drain everything out. It was a common belief in many different cultures that the world was a flat plane, seemingly eternal, disc-shaped perhaps, divided into four quadrants, sometimes mistranslated as corners, and that it was covered by a giant dome like a snow globe, and that above that was eternal water that would come in through windows in the sky. And so this guy tears a hole in the sky and it rains and

it floods. There's your common thread. Something we know is false. That's the common thread with so many of these flood stories. But the flood stories that you get from Greece and from all over Iraq are the same story. They're recounting the same event, which apparently happened in around the 2900 B.C.

at the end of the Jemta Nasur period, and it's detailed in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and even in the Sumerian King list. They're talking about the same flood that's definite, but it's not global. It's centered on the city of Shurapak. We know when it happened, we know where it happened, we know the extent. Even the Bible maintains the exact same depth as was detailed in the Epic of Gilgamesh, 15 cubits. That's 22 feet deep. That doesn't get to

the foothills of Mount Ararat. Speaker 1: Of course, Aaron and I have since become good friends, and we took the stage recently in Fort Worth. He's a brother. And, you know, he's one of those guys. He's so geeky smart. He talks about evolution. He's also usually got a giant snake wrapped around his neck. He and Matt Delahunty big into reptiles, so it's not uncommon when they are out on the circuit. Aron will put

a snake in a container and take it to a convention. And he walks around the hotel convention halls with a giant. I don't even know what the hell that thing is. some 10, 15 foot thing that he wears like a necklace and pets like a dog. But, uh, That was a memory from 16 years ago. Okay, let's step back into the time machine. Let me roll us back to the 20th of March, 2014, over 12 years ago. I

had the chance to interview Nathan Phelps. This man has become a brother of mine. The son of the late hate preacher Fred Phelps, founder of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, that church. Founded in 1955, widely acknowledged as a hate group and a cult known for its unconscionable, offensive protests in public. They protest funerals. They say things like, thank

God for dead soldiers engaging in constant vitriol against atheists, Jews, Muslims, transgender people, other Christian denominations that they consider soft or unbiblical. These people are so insensitive. infected with a cancer of hate.

Fred Phelps died on March the 19th of 2014, and the next day, I spoke to his son, the man who escaped Westboro, and he talked about the day that he made his break. Speaker 11: Well, okay, so I had bought this old Nash Rambler.

I don't know if folks will know what that is. It's an old Rambler Classic. It was a car line for a while, and I bought it for 300 bucks. I had it stashed away, kept it hidden from everyone and had slowly packed what few belongings I had. And I hid them in our garage. And then on, uh, the night of my 18th birthday, when it was, it was about 1030 around there that everyone had settled down and the place got quiet. And I, uh, got dressed and went out, walked to the car, which was two

or three blocks away, drove it back to the garage, backed it in the driveway. And, uh, opened the garage door, put everything in the trunk, and then pulled the car just back out onto the street, just in case someone happened along. They wouldn't know that it had anything to do with me, right? And then I went into the house, and our dining room was broken up by a set

of stairs that went up into the upper floor where my father's room was. And from the bottom of those stairs, I could look to the left, And above the, we had like three refrigerators and a freezer lining the wall there. And there was a clock above them. And then to the right was one of the doors out into the church, the sanctuary of the church. And from that angle, you could see that the pulpit that he had preached at.

And I stood there and I thought about that history that I'd had there, listening to him preach doctrines of, of hate. And, uh, I remember backing around the table. It was just to the left of me. I don't know, countless times with him coming at me with a Madhawk handle.

And then I watched the clock and I watched it slowly turn up to midnight. And I turned around and walked out. Speaker 1: Your heart must be going 1,000 miles an hour. I mean, do you have any savings? Do you have any place to sleep? Do you have a plan?

Speaker 11: Jeff, I had done absolutely no planning at all. The objective was to escape. I take that back. I had talked to a friend of mine who ran a gas station just next to the high school I attended. And he had agreed to let me sleep in the bathroom of the gas station if I needed to. So I stayed there for the first, I think I was there three nights. And then my brother got wind of me leaving,

and his mother-in-law reached out and offered me a place to stay. I had made no plans. It was all about getting out. I wasn't the brightest, but I was determined. Speaker 1: Nate, how many siblings total busted out of there? How many of your brothers and sisters got free of all this madness?

Speaker 11: Well, in the end, three of us did out of the 13 siblings. Speaker 1: Man, I love that guy's voice. I mean, not just, you know, this sincerity and the goodness behind it, but the tenor of his voice. I had him voice that he actually narrated via long distance, a piece that I did called Something Beautiful. I reached out and I said, hey, Nate, I really hear you in the background of this. And so the recording scenario was not great. There was a

big air conditioner in the room and we were trying to reduce the noise long distance via Zoom. And I was giving vocal or kind of stage direction from long distance. Speaker 5: You know what? Speaker 1: I'm going to play the audio of that. You can just YouTube it if you want to see the visuals, but it totally works without. You can hear the imperfections in the narration recording itself, but Nate was perfect. This released 10 years ago on my YouTube channel. It's the

audio from a think piece I titled Something Beautiful. Speaker 9: Why are we so quick to see the ugly when we stand before the beautiful? Why have we declared that those who are different than us are separate from us?

Why do we stand before the light only to turn and face the darkness? Far back to the earliest moments of human memory, we've broken ourselves into small tribes of inclusion, only so that we could treat others with exclusion. We told ourselves that we were right, that we were superior,

and that God was on our side. So many sacred scriptures, rites, edicts, and doctrines are bathed in the blood of tribes, each one warring against the other, each one declaring divine right, each prepared to take their divisions, their bigotry, their fear,

and their hatred to the grave. And tragically, many do so, Thousands and thousands of groups, religions, cultures, races and nations, each declaring that it's us versus them. Each building their temples, monuments and messages upon the human tragedy of ignorance, division

and hate. It's such a waste to look at all others and hope to only see ourselves. to stand upon the claims of primitive times and primitive minds, declaring that times and minds should never change, and holding in contempt

the very people we should be holding in our arms. Ignorance, fear, hatred, we teach it to our children. They teach it to their children, who teach it to their children, We cloak it in the shroud of righteousness. We speak it in the name of justice. And we claim it in the

name of God. And we could be so much better. I have witnessed the power of hatred. But I discovered a much grander and better world beyond. I see your face.

and it is beautiful. I hear your voice, and it is beautiful. I know that you're different than me, and it is beautiful. And I'm proud to stand beside you like a brother. I am your brother. We are links in the human chain, alive at this moment for a brief, priceless chance to breathe the air. to feel the sun

upon our faces, to speak the very best words for the very best reasons, to pursue the best ideas and achieve the greatest dreams, to unite instead of divide, to heal instead of harm, and to share together the preciousness of life. Wouldn't it be something if those were the things we taught to our children? To look at someone

who is different, wonderfully different, and see something beautiful.

Speaker 1: See what I mean? I could have narrated that, but there's something about Nathan Phelps and his history and his backstory and the equity that he brings to these conversations about equality and equity and beauty and humanity. I'm just so grateful for that guy. I mentioned Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller. There was a convention, and Penn and Teller were the featured keynote speakers for that. They were doing some magic, but also a presentation, and to help

promote it, Penn came on the show. He, of course, is an out loud and proud atheist, and we talked a little bit about the word agnostic. This was the 1st of September, 2015. It's a hugely entertaining book, but you're pretty hard on agnostics. In the book, you say some obviously inflammatory things. It's a hugely entertaining book, but you're pretty hard on agnostics. There's a chapter that says, agnostics, no one can know for sure, but I believe they're

full of shit. Okay, let's just start there. Agnostics are copping out. What do you think? Speaker 6: Well, you know, I make this after the headline. I make it a little bit clear. I think there's partially copping out. It's also possibly a I believe it's a misuse of terms. Agnostic, the root, deals with epistemology. It's

how we ascertain truth. An atheist deals with what we believe. So I believe that everyone, virtually everyone, is agnostic. But if you don't know, you don't believe. So as soon as a person says, I don't know about Jesus, they've automatically said they're an atheist. It answers two different questions.

If I say, do you know whether there's a God or not? And you answer no, then you are an agnostic. If I say, do you believe there's a God? And you answer, I don't actively believe, then you're an atheist.

And I believe that all, or at least most agnostics are actually atheists. They're just using a different term. It's kind of like you asking me, are you gay? and me answering, well, I like to bowl. And you go, good, you like to bowl, but I was asking, because I was interested in having sex with you, if you're gay.

And you say, well, I'd like to go bowling. And you go, good, let's go bowling. Are we going to have sex afterwards? So I say, do you believe in God? And you say, I'm agnostic. And I go, yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 5: We'll go bowling and talk about being agnostic. But do you believe? Do you actively believe? And a lot of times.

I get my. Speaker 6: Inspiration from the evangelical Christians because I believe they're the. Speaker 5: Most honest of the Christians. Speaker 6: And they say that to not know is to not believe. If you do not actively believe in Christ, you are not a Christian. I'm willing to go with that, too.

And so my point is agnostic in common usage seems to be that there's a continuum and there's there's theists. and there's atheist, and there's agnostic right in the middle.

Speaker 5: That's not what it is. Speaker 6: There is theist and agnostic, which is a, I mean, there's theist and atheist, which is a binary system. You either believe in God or you don't. There's agnostic, which answers how we ascertain a truth of the universe. So I would definitely, if you said, are you agnostic? I would say, sure. There's a lot of stuff we don't know.

And then you would say, do you actively believe? Speaker 5: I'd say, no. And you'd go, eh, atheism. Speaker 1: Now, to clarify, we were talking about his 2011 book, a memoir, and a collection of essays called God Know, Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales.

Ben Gillette. Jump forward a couple of years. This was March the 20th, 2018. I had New Testament scholar and author Dr. Bart Ehrman on the broadcast. We were talking about his book, The Triumph of Christianity, How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World. And I asked him about Jesus mythicism.

How do we know there was an actual guy named Jesus? Here's that exchange. Interesting water cooler discussion. I don't really hang much on it, whether or not Jesus was a real guy or not. For me, if there was not a God-man Jesus, then I can dismiss the supernatural aspects of it. But how do we know there was a Jesus Jesus? How do we know there was a guy walking the shores of Galilee and casting the nets out with the apostles? How do we know that this guy was around?

Speaker 2: Well, a lot of atheists get really ticked off at me because they think that I'm their friend, but then I tell them that Jesus really did exist. Speaker 1: I mean, wait, you get anger from atheists? I mean, because the idea that the legend's based on a guy, it's not a huge stretch, really. But how do we know?

Speaker 5: It's not a stretch. I mean, it's absolutely true. It is based on a guy. Speaker 2: And so, no, I get more vitriol from atheists about this topic than I get from conservative fundamentalist Christians. Speaker 5: About the other things I say. Yeah. Speaker 2: But it's because I wrote a book called Did Jesus Exist?

where I marshal all of the evidence. Yes, there was a man, Jesus, and we can say some things about him. Uh, it's not that he was, um, walking on the water and, uh, you know, raising the dead and things, but there are, but there are things that he said and did that we can know for with relative certainty that the sources are good enough that we can say that much. Uh, and then in this book, did Jesus exist? I actually go into what we can actually say about him. Um, But yeah, I mean, one thing, just speaking about the

Apostle Paul, Paul, in an offhand comment, Paul tells us that he knows Jesus' brother, James, and he knows Jesus' closest disciple, Peter. He actually spent time with these people. And so it's quite obvious that Jesus existed. I mean, he had a brother that Paul knew.

Speaker 5: So, yeah. Speaker 1: The argument being that, well, can you verify that Paul wrote the letter and just because it was written down? I mean, I can understand how this becomes a quicksand of argumentation back and forth. Speaker 5: It can be. Speaker 2: But, you know, the thing is, it's possible to doubt everything.

I mean, it's possible to doubt that you and I are actually talking right now. And so what we do when we make judgments about this is we weigh out the probabilities of And what historians do is they establish the probabilities that something happened. I mean, is it probable that Lincoln gave.

Speaker 5: The Gettysburg Address? Yeah, it's probable. Could somebody mount an argument that he didn't? Of course they could. Speaker 2: But, you know, you've got to be– if you're doing history, it's not like doing a science experiment, you know, where you can just repeat the experiment 200 times and get the same results. History is a matter of probabilities, not of certainties. And so– Did Jesus probably exist?

Speaker 13: Yes. Speaker 2: I mean, it's so highly probable. Speaker 5: So somebody can doubt it if they choose to. But then you have to wonder, why are they going out of their way to deny this? You know, they probably have some other stake in the matter. Speaker 1: I mentioned slash boasted that I had the chance to interview John Delancey. This clip is from the first time we chatted, January 15th, 2019. He was actually touring with a play, or he was talking about how he had

toured with a play about the Scopes Monkey trial. He's a big proponent of teaching evolutionary science, and he was sharing an interesting anecdote with me. Speaker 13: I was in a classroom in Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska, and I was there to talk to, this was during the Scopes thing, we had to talk in colleges, and I think one of the deals was that Ed would talk in one college, and then I'd talk in the other.

And there were 100 kids, supposedly people who were interested in acting, and they were asking questions. And at the end, the teacher said to the group, he said, you know, I saw the show last night, and you really should go and see it. How many of you have seen the show? And, you know, like three of them had raised their hands. You can kind of go, well, okay.

And he said, but I saw it, and I really recommend it. And I said to the class, I said, well, thank you, thank you. Please do come and see the show, and thank you very much. I'm turning to leave, and the professor said, oh, and he gave me that kind of look, which is, you know, watch this. And he said, by the way, with a show of hands, how many of you believe that the world was created in 4004 B.C.

at 10 o'clock in the morning on October 23rd? And about 80 kids raised their hands. And I. I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. The first thing that I thought of was 500 years of finding things out had simply left the room. Curiosity had left the room. And it made me sad. It

made me sad to the extent that I'm somebody who wakes up every morning, and I've done it all my life, whether it was the newspaper in the morning or the radio or now, you know, Google News, whatever it is, the first thing I look at is what did we learn today science-wise? What did we learn today? Well, we just touched on to, you know, an aspect. Oh my God, isn't that amazing? And we're going to, whatever it is,

take a basket down and it's going to get dust and then the dust. Isn't that amazing? And I saw all of that go out of the window. And that night when we were getting ready to do the show, I told the cast and I said, yeah, I had this experience and I'm still reeling from it. And I turned to one of the girls from the college who was there and who had been there the night before.

She was helping, you know, whatever. She was sort of a theater person who was helping us. And I said, whatever her name was, you know, Alice. I said, Alice, would you have raised your hand? And she said, oh, yes. And I said, really, why? She said, well, because God is.

Speaker 11: My bus driver. Speaker 13: I said, Alice, I don't know what that means. It means that I can get on my bus and go to the back of the bus and party hardy because I know that God is driving my bus. And again, I was reeling in terms of my sense of that is such an abdication of authority. of one's own personal

responsibility about everything. Speaker 6: Oh, my God. Speaker 13: I was just like in free fall. And that's when I began to say, you know, the little bit that I get to talk to a lot of people because of Star Trek or whatever, you know, other shows that I've done, I'm going to try to address this issue.

I'm going to try to talk about this issue. Speaker 1: From January 15th, 2019, John Delancey, the episode was titled The Truth and the Lie. I have retrieved even more goodness from the archives on this show number 900. Some scientists and a mortician. I have a mortician clip. That

and more coming up next. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for your support on Patreon. If you enjoy the broadcast, if you've been with me for nine episodes or the full 900 episodes, your support makes a difference. Patreon.com slash Seth Andrews. And we continue sort

of dipping into a few of our many broadcasts from years past. They say never meet your heroes, but occasionally it works out. I was honored to be able to meet one of mine, Dr. Prothero. Donald Prothero, an American geologist, paleontologist, science educator. He's written more than 30 books, 300 plus scientific papers. He's the guy featured on television as he took creationists to the Grand Canyon and asked them basic

questions about the layers and the sediment and all of that. challenging them to challenge their own faith. He had a speech that I discovered online called Evolution, What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters. And That speech was given at a university, and it was horribly shot and horribly recorded, so I got a chance to get him to give the speech again, and I shot video of that my way.

You can find it on YouTube. But I had him on the show. It was called Basic Evolution for Creationists. It aired in November 2019, and I wanted to ask him about a common apologetic argument against evolution. Let's talk about the 747 and a tornado argument. The only reason I bring it up is because some of the old school hardcore apologists still bring it up, and it's the complexity argument. If you can explain the tornado and 747 in a junkyard argument for everybody, and then why it

is incorrect. Speaker 3: The argument actually goes back to not a creationist, but to a famous astronomer named Fred Hoyle, who was also sort of an iconoclast, and he was arguing that the odds of assembling the complexity of molecular biology by random chance is the same as the odds of, say, assembling a complicated item like a bowl in 747 out of a tornado in a junkyard, something along those lines. And that, of course, is picked up by Dwayne Gish for many years in his debates, and a lot of creationists use

it still. And it's a completely false analogy because it takes a completely false idea about evolution. This is almost always the case. These arguments are made against evolution. They're shooting at the wrong target. They're shooting at a straw man that doesn't represent evolution at all. And in this particular case, what's going on in this argument is they say, well, evolution can't cause us because there's random chance it won't produce something ordered. But evolution is not random, okay? Natural

selection is a very highly directed and very, very fine-tuned mechanism, and it's completely non-random. Natural selection selects among things that were chosen by random by genetic variation. So the only part that's random in this system is that what you get in the way of a product is generated by genetic mutations and things like that. But then natural selection sorts it, and only the best variants will survive. And another analogy which is commonly used to get attack evolution

is saying, what are the odds that a monkey with a typewriter can type out the works of Shakespeare or even just one line from Shakespeare? Of course, you calculate that, it seems ridiculous. But again, the analogy is completely wrong. It's not what evolution is about. And a better way to put that together is to say, what about a monkey with a word processor that has a spell check?

And you know this if you've ever typed in any of the word processing softwares that have spell checks. You type in a word that it recognizes, it will fix it for you. And the same way natural selection works. It will get rid of any bad things by either fixing them or dumping them and looking for a variant that does work. And so it's highly selective. It has a way of editing out bad stuff and it's generated by random mutation and ends up producing things that are very, very fine-tuned. So this is entirely based on this misconception about how evolution is.

Speaker 11: It's not random. Speaker 3: Natural selection is very directed. Only the source of variation is random. Speaker 1: This was an unexpected opportunity. I had the chance seven years ago to talk to a mortician. I am fascinated with death. I'm fascinated with our perceptions of death and how the American culture often wants to avoid the subject, but not Caitlin Doughty. She had just released a book called Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from

Tiny Mortals About Death. And we talked about the United States and about the business of death in this country. Do you feel like the United States is sort of behind the curve? A lot of cultures seem to be more enlightened. They're more open. They're less weird about death.

Do you I mean, am I getting that wrong? Do you think the U.S. is sort of behind the curve? Speaker 14: Yeah, we absolutely are. And I think I would never, and I've written books about other cultures, I wouldn't feel comfortable going into another culture and saying like, oh, you're doing this wrong. But because I am a mortician and own a funeral home in the United States, I feel more than comfortable criticizing my own culture and how we handle death. Because I think that there's a way, a sort of traditional funeral industry that sucks everybody in, that

sucks in Different religious groups, different cultural groups, immigrant groups, and it all gets sucked into this pretty bland way of death where you're embalmed, you're chemically preserved, you're laid out in the makeup. Everybody comes and awkwardly taps your hand as they walk by and then just sits down and doesn't really do much for the funeral. And I hear a lot of people saying that that no longer really does much for them. That leaves them, especially younger people,

it leaves them feeling alienated from the funeral experience. They don't feel like it's any way ritualistic or transformative for their grief. And they're left without much feeling. We'll probably go into this more, but... That doesn't mean that we need to bring back religion to our death. There can be ritual and there can be incredibly powerful things that we do at death that have absolutely nothing to do with death or nothing to do with religion that are entirely secular. And that's actually a big part of my advocacy as well.

Speaker 1: I would talk a lot about, well, depending on the subject of the show, we get into the wedding industry and how it's. You know, they have this framework that you are supposed to use, a traditional venue, preacher, dress, talks, candelabras, cakes, flowers, photographer, blah.

Speaker 13: Blah, blah. Speaker 1: And you get into sort of the business where it becomes this list of expectations instead of really being a personalized experience for the people involved. The same is true for funerals, is it not? Speaker 14: 100% same for funerals. And you'll go into a funeral home.

I actually recently had A family that I was helping through a nonprofit they were connected with where these two young men lost their mother to cancer. And I believe they were immigrant family. They obviously didn't have much money. And they were having to do a GoFundMe for, I think, $ 25, 000.

because that is what was being quoted to them by the funeral home they went to, there is no way that a simple funeral, a simple meaningful funeral, should have cost that family $ 25, 000. That's bonkers. What I say a lot of the time is you should be paying for, you have to pay for the bare minimum at funerals.

You have to pay for a simple cremation, a simple burial, a simple viewing, if that's what you want, and that should run you $ 1, 000 to $ 4, 000, let's say. But beyond that, the things that you're paying for should be things that you want to pay for. They should be things that are meaningful to you and your family. So if you have money and you want to spend $ 500 on elaborate cheese plates or an Elvis cover band or a mariachi band or alcohol or whatever is meaningful for you, that's

what you should be paying money for. You shouldn't be paying money for things just because the funeral home says they're on the list of things you should be paying for. Speaker 1: It's funny, I think of that scene in Big Lebowski where Donnie died and they were at the funeral home and he's like, it's our most modestly priced receptacle. And it was like a $ 300 urn. And they're like, what are you, are you shitting me? I mean, give me a Folgers can. Let's do that, right? I mean, after a while, it just becomes about... Well, it's supposed to be expensive. And if you don't pay a lot of money,

then maybe you don't really care. Speaker 9: Right. Speaker 14: Which is ludicrous. And that's been a problem for a long time because we feel uncomfortable as a society price shopping for funerals, right? Like if you're going to buy a new car, you would almost be a fool to walk into the Lexus dealership and just walk out with a full price car. People would say, what's wrong with you?

Why did you do that? But we do not feel comfortable calling around, asking for prices, understanding what our rights are with prices around funerals because we think that's somehow disrespectful. But I do think that's changing. I think a lot of people now are saying, if you don't price shop for my funeral, that goes against who I was in life.

My mother would never be comfortable with me just blindly shelling out $ 10, 000 for a funeral, especially if I ended up with a lot of things that weren't particularly meaningful to her. Speaker 5: In the process. Speaker 1: The world-famous Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal. He passed away in March of 2024. But the year before, I had the honor of having a conversation with him on a show titled Primates and Prejudice. And he had some fascinating

insight about our connection to the animal world. I have that conversation many times with those who believe that, you know, you must be assigned a sense of morality. They call it the objective moral standard handed down from on high, whether it's a spiritual other, a deity or whatnot. And looking at it now, I think, well, I mean, a cooperative species is safer and has more resources. It doesn't seem all that difficult. I mean, am I distilling it

down to, am I too simplistic with that, you think? Speaker 8: No, it is true that cooperation is found all over the animal world. I'm not even talking about the social insects like bees and ants. But cooperation is very common in the animal world. And yeah, it's a survival strategy.

Many animals cannot live. If they live alone, they don't survive. So they need each other and they work together. So that's the way I look at it, you know, as a survival strategy. Speaker 1: So let's flip the coin from joy to angst or sadness or pain. Many times, you know, we look down our noses at the lower primates and we don't see these animals. I don't know, we would call them human emotions, but they're not really. I mean, we see grief, pain,

empathy in that way. Do you want to speak to that in the primate world, sir? Speaker 8: Yeah, I don't think there are uniquely human emotions. I compare it a little bit to the organs. I don't have any organ in my body that you don't find in a dog. Even as a comparison with frogs, I mean, frogs also have hearts and lungs and brains and all of that. So I don't have any unique organs in the same way I don't think I have any unique emotions.

People always assume that humans are more emotional or have richer emotions. I'm not convinced of that. And so if you make these comparisons of, let's say, morality and sociality, we have a tendency in the West to, if humans behave badly, to put that on the animal side. And so to say they're acting like animals, and that's a negative.

And if humans do something wonderful and are nice to each other and altruistic, which we also. Speaker 5: Can do, then it's humane. Speaker 8: We call it human. Speaker 5: That's our thing. Speaker 8: I think that's a complete misunderstanding. All these tendencies, the positive ones and the negative ones, they come from our primate nature.

Speaker 5: And so there is very little new, I would say, in human psychology. Speaker 1: This was a fun exchange from May the 30th, 2023. I had Dr. Cara Santa Maria. She is a science communicator. She is the host of the podcast Talk Nerdy and co-host the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. We were talking about America's culture of science and anti-science. Why is science so freaking political? I just don't get it. If something,

a piece of science, a piece of data comes forward that says this will help make us safer, it seems like the United States immediately makes it a referendum on freedom. Somebody said that if they found out that breathing oxygen was medicinal, people would hold their breath until they die.

I don't know, Kara. Are you as frustrated as the rest of us? Speaker 4: Oh, 100%. Speaker 15: I'm incredibly frustrated. And I think for me, and maybe I tend to philosophize things a little bit, and maybe that's a protective mechanism for me. I don't really know.

But I think one of the things that I struggle with is the argument, and not saying that you're making it, because I've made it as well, but the argument that science is being politicized and that's the problem. But I think that science is inherently political. And I think that politics is inherently human. And so I don't think that the problem is that people are ideologically driven and they see certain scientific choices or scientific outcomes as either in

keeping with or in conflict with their ideology. I think that has always been the case. I think the problem is really the deepening right wing or the, I guess the increase in right wing sentiment in our country right now.

That's the thing that worries me the most, this sort of authoritarian movement, which is deeply distrustful of government systems. And sadly, which fine, okay, you want to be like an anarchist. You want to be somebody who like questions everything like, you know, that like not even a true skeptic is a true skeptic, right? Is going to look at the evidence and go like, okay, I'm now going to inform my decisions, but more of a denialist, like, okay,

I guess that's your purview. That's your choice. But this movement towards, well, I don't trust anything that, but I can put all of my trust in this one person who tells me that they're going to save me from myself. I think it's fundamentally problematic when it comes to evangelical or deeply entrenched religions. And I think it's fundamentally problematic when we look at historical experiences of fascism, of genocide,

of even eugenics. It's not about tribalism per se. It's about putting all of your eggs into the basket of a savior. And I think that's really what scares me more than anything. I don't think it's because science is political. Science is political.

Speaker 5: I mean, people will. Speaker 1: Often ask us about, you know, why do you talk politics? And I'm like, well, if we're going to talk about our values, our values are political. But I think the tie I'm making, I'm thinking of the seatbelts, right? They were introduced back in the mid-20th century. Oh, everybody needs to buckle up because it will make you safer in your cars. And just like we saw with the COVID vaccine, etc., there was a huge segment of the population that wailed and moaned and complained. And, you know, this is, it's

an attack on my liberties to be able to drive without a seatbelt. You know, I'm going to show them kind of thing. I don't know if it's, this feels like a uniquely American thing. Speaker 15: It does feel uniquely American. I think to some extent, there are a lot of cultural components here. You know, the deep, insidious individualism, that rugged individualism, the manifest destiny, you know, a lot of the the core sort of colonial and supremacist quote-unquote values that our country was founded

on and that continue to permeate. I do think that they're showing the, not the only dark side, but one of the many dark sides in this experience. But I don't think this is new. And I think it might be more obvious now, but I don't think it's new. I mean, you've probably seen these archive images of the Spanish flu and people saying, anti-maskers marching with signs and the government campaigns to try and get people to wear

masks and people being like, it's my right not to wear a mask. And so I think that what happens when you have such a deeply individualist society that's been coerced, I don't know, that's been trained, maybe that's a good word, to believe that no matter who you are and no matter where you come from, you yourself can excel. you yourself, which we know that's not true, right? We know that

there are certain predispositions. Like if you come from money, if you are white, if you are male, if you are Protestant, whatever, if you are cis, if you are hetero, like you already have like a massive leg up and it just, it's undeniable. And I don't want to argue with that anymore with, argue about that anymore with anybody because the evidence is clear as day. But I think that there's this rhetoric in our country that's really insidious, that no matter who you are, where you come from, you can prevail. One day you will be a billionaire.

One day you will have power and prestige. And what comes from that deeply individualistic socialization is a lack of community-oriented, social justice-oriented humanity. And the truth is, the problem here, when somebody says, I don't want to wear a mask, is not that they're like, my rights are being trampled on.

That's what they say, because that's the rhetoric they've been fed. But the problem is, I care more about my freedom than about your safety. Speaker 1: That was a fascinating conversation from May of 2023, episode number 677. It seems like so long ago. Of course, it goes without saying, but I gotta say it, that so many of the best conversations we've had on the broadcast were not necessarily with marquee names, but with everyday people.

You and me just hanging out, sharing our stories, doing life, as they used to say in the church, and just trying to figure things out together. I've had so many wonderful encounters with people all around the world, people who have become my family. Show number 900. It's a big deal.

And you're the one who has sort of helped propel us to this moment. So from me and from Natalie and from Linus and Gracie and Kat... Thank you so very much for bringing us into your life. And here we go. 100 more broadcasts until we hit 1,000. And I'm going to figure out a way to have that party.

If it's a live show, a convention, something else, I'm going to make a big noise about it between now and then. Looks like I've got about two years to figure it out. Be safe out there. Thank you again. And I'll see you next time. Speaker 7: Follow The Thinking Atheist on Facebook and Twitter.

Speaker 4: For a complete archive of podcasts Speaker 7: And videos, products like mugs and t-shirts featuring The Thinking Atheist logo, links to Atheist pages and resources, and details on upcoming free thought events and conventions, log on to our website, thethinkingatheist.com.