Breaking The Cycle: How To Help Kids Out Of Religion! - Phil Ferguson - Skepticon 5

here's Phil Ferguson hello oh it works how y'all doing that was pretty good let's try again good morning yeah we are gonna have some fun today so I hope you are already just a little personal notes I bought a house yesterday bad news now I own too so a little later we are gonna have some fun so I'm just making sure everything is here I had a little fun experience two days ago I guess on my drive through Missouri we're in his town called Rolla have you ever heard of it nice place I was listening to Christian radio because I was feeling kind of sleepy and they pissed me off and I can't sleep when I'm pissed just ask my wife so tight and there's this lady on named Karen and she's asking for money they play a song really sappy I love Jesus song and then they beg for money and then Jesus was wonderful can do anything except for print money send us some money and at some point she says everyone listening to this radio station should call and donate money if you're not if you're listening and not donating money I want you to call and explain to me why you're not donating money challenge accepted so I called and the person answered the phone said are you calling to make a donation and I said no Karen asked me to call they've seemed a little confused but they fetched Karen for me and Karen comes on the phone and she says can I help you I said you asked me to call you and I was waiting for her to say something like oh I get from God but I explained that I wasn't donating money she asked me to call she said well why not and I said well I'm an atheist really and as a matter of fact I'm driving to Springfield Missouri where 1500 mostly I know a couple of you may not be but we'll work on it 1,500 atheists are gonna be at attendance for a convention called skeptic on really I said yes and matter of fact I am a speaker at this convention and should well what's your talk on I said how to get kids out of religion oh my well about 15 minutes later after a song finishes she comes back on the radio and she says people I need to talk to you about something I just had this very disturbing call from someone who's rejected Jesus and he has told me that in Springfield Missouri this weekend there are 15,000 atheists and I thought to myself I did not say 15,000 I I know I said 1500 she was off by a factor of 10 but I thought Christian factor of 10 that's pretty accurate and I just realized I didn't plug in my little controller so I'm gonna roam a little bit while I'm doing that since this is Sunday morning we are going to have communion and I have to uh sure that have agreed to help me if they can please come to the altar here and right in the center gentlemen we we got to be balanced in the eyes of the Lord that's just kind of how it works not my rules sorry let's get that here in a second what we have for you is we have Mentos for 1,000 so they're gonna pass up Mentos this is going to be your Holy Sacrament if you want to imagine that it turns into a piece of an ancient dead man just for memory sakes go for it go forth thank you gentlemen some some some some something okay and then instead of wine can I can I have one of those I need to save one out I'm prepared you will see this in action before the day is over before the hour is over Lawrence said it was okay where's did she leave guy it's cute trust me the talk is breaking the cycle we're at skeptic on 5 welcome my business website is Polaris financial planning comm it's on the screen in case you can't hear me for some strange reason I have to tell you because the state of Illinois strongly recommends that I tell you that I am a registered investment advisor with the state of Illinois as soon as I tell you that I'm registered with the state of Illinois I basically have to tell you that that doesn't mean they don't endorse me they don't approve of me I just basically filled out a 30 page form that they required me to fill out and they said I did a good job so I get a little star this is my blog skeptic money if you don't read any blogs come to mind a few do read blogs come to mine my new thing is a pink atheist pad podcast with Rachel and Jimmy and are right over here give my hand and arm we have a live show Sunday from 3 to 5 central and our mission is to lift all boats we all believe strongly that atheists should do less fighting and should do more promoting of each other so if you are doing anything in the movement we'd love to have you on are there leftovers thank you thank you thank you for those who showed up late screw them one of my big things is to is it's great that you come to conventions and I'm so delighted that you made it at 9:30 thank you very much but you need to go out and do something call people like Karen on the Christian radio station rattle her cage a little bit I swear after she got done telling the story I was waiting for her to break down and start crying because she was nervous shaking go do things in the community whether it's helping a food bank picking up the side of a road it doesn't have to be a lot meeting in the pubs is awesome but you need to go out and do something one of the things that I've done and I wanted to talk to you about it for just a moment is being involved with this event the first year they had about 150 people and Lauren can correct me if I get this wrong second year about 300 people the third year they were maxed out with a room that had 500 people JT put out a call and said we need help the problem is people come and donate money but we need the money in advance to get this beautiful place for skeptic on three so I called him I said how much do you need they told me after I picked myself up off the floor I said do you think you're gonna get it back when people donate and he says yes I said okay I will give you the money and skeptic on three exploded from 500 people to 1,000 people and to this day still I consider that one of the best investments I've ever made in my life 500 extra people got to come to a free convention now while it is free and it is growing because we went to 1,100 and hopefully today we'll get to 1,500 pz asked if the room would be filled and I said when are you talking so I said about seven o'clock tonight this place is gonna be standing room only it is free but we need your money and this is something that the Christians are kicking our ass doing asking for money so if you have no money and you just barely made it here with the gas in your tank it's all good but if you have some money and I know some of you do share a little this convention might have cost you four or five hundred dollars if it was somewhere else 100 bucks couple hundred bucks thousand if you want just something to think about this is my little reminder usually when you go to a play or a theater or something like that they tell you to make sure you pull out your phones and turn them off I want you to pull out your phones and make sure you turn them on I want you to go to Twitter if you have a Twitter account and yes I do want you to do this right now so I should see some movement pretend like you're doing something and we are going to try a little social experiment instead of having a great big Christian radio station with 18 towers all across Missouri reaching a couple million people we own the web so I'm gonna suggest and ask you to do a group tweet that we're gonna send out all of us at the same time and just blow up the phones of everybody who's not here so skeptic on five has started it and you are missing it the first speaker is amazing just saying you should follow at skeptic money now our goal in this experiment is for me to add 1,000 Twitter followers so let's see if you can do it and if you feel the necessity go ahead and add shameless and a little bit about my story to give you some perspective from where I'm coming from you know as an average kid growing up in a Methodist Church which I've since learned is basically Christianese for I believed in Bigfoot and aliens and I love those shows on TV just like people love the ghost hunter shows today which I can't wrap my head around and they tell us about this guy the Jesus of love and how wonderful he was I'm sorry not this guy this guy the Jesus of love buddy buddy Jesus and he's all good and the Bible's not literal and it doesn't really mean what people think it means and we all go to heaven then I ran into this guy I still remember having to go to my parents bedroom and watch cosmos once a week for an hour on a 9-inch black-and-white TV because that's all we had because the big TV the 19-inch behemoths in the family room was tuned to Love Boat and this was the highlight of my week each and every week was watching this show and even today I get emotional thinking about it because it changed my life but then I had my fall I went back to church I got married we had a kid everybody in the family one of the kids baptized it's a little spritz of water meaningless trivial event sure why not apparently most churches don't want to just give out free baptisms you have to be a member so we join I'll just pretend no big deal we do the baptism next thing you know we put the kids into preschool because in our society doesn't apparently value preschool enough to to set it up for everybody so you have to go to a church to get preschool and then they went to the Christian school because it was attached to the preschool and they heard he knew the kids and the teachers and the school was about to go bankrupt so I went to the board meeting to make some suggestions and they basically said if you know so much why don't you run I did I spent three years on the Christian school board as a closeted atheist I saved the school from going bankrupt I was there for three years to as the treasurer I have a lot of to make up for it when I finally got off the school board a couple of the elders corner to me one Sunday after service and they said we would like you to be the outreach chair for the entire church and bring in new members to this organization I thought what have I done apparently I was the perfect candidate I'm relatively articulate I have a penis I'm white you know so I fit the suit so there's that now the good news is that non-belief nuns and of course a subset of that atheists are exploding and the top number up here a little pointer barely works see if you can see it the unaffiliated has grown to 24% 25% with the nuns you also have at the very bottom this don't know what religion they are I countin them to the the others and non-christians generally not our problem in America today so we're well on our way and it's not just this study we have this brand new one from the American value survey which shows the youngest adults 18 to 29 32% are unaffiliated or nuns and they're not going to a church they probably did as a kid because their parents took them but now they're not and they don't go back this is the most important chart here from the Pew Forum the greatest generation of Silent Generation the boomers the Gen Xers all of these lines at least for as long as we have them whatever you are by about 20 25 30 it doesn't change good or bad so this generation up here that's 34% non-religious they're gonna stay 34% so that is fantastic so that inspires my idea and the churches know they have to get to the kids knocking on doors in converting 40 year olds is really tough but if you can get them in Vacation Bible School or preschool you can get them this is a compilation that I made of that same data from cue form because they used to do this survey every 15 or 20 years and then they've changed to doing it about every five years or seven years so when you just look at the data it looks like it's linear growth I want to tell you it's not linear now extrapolation is always dangerous but based on the data we already have not only is non religion and atheism growing it's growing at a growing rate some people don't think it's a battle I do and we're winning the battle I like to have fun with Christians as an example that radio show so my daughter now and I were out eating one time in a Chinese restaurant and he had fortune cookies at the end and we thought why don't religions ever put messages in fortune cookies my daughter who was way too grown-up for her age suggest that maybe they're worried about the fact that people will add in bed and I thought she was on to something so on my website skeptic money.com we had a little contest and I promised to show the winners here today so when you read these phrases remember to add in your own head in bed so we have your rod and your staff they comfort me behold I come quickly with a unicorn be willing to serve thee famine worried me jesus wept and i left off but i was one of my you know runner-ups as you know come forth the little children or something but to Catholic and the Lord opened the mouth of the ass and I had to throw in as a bonus not one of the winners but one of my personal favorites just because it was non-christian Mohammed Oh see you don't laugh at that one thank you now we're gonna talk about one of the tactics I use when talking to Christians and like JT who I adore is he in here I talked good about him and he's not even here to see it I love talking to Christians every year where is the eisah you guys here this is the illini secular Student Alliance they've got about 20 members here from Champaign Illinois in that matter of fact it just just hit me anyone who's in a college score high school group right now please stand up and let's give them a round of applause because they are amazing look at this Wow thank you thank you thank you I have been doing this long enough where I've been at events where I was the youngest person and sometimes by quite a lot now I'm not and they are the future and when we have to make sure that they succeed I go on the campus of U of I on the quad for quad day where they all the students get to see all the tables and they put their secular student table in the middle of the Christian tables because they don't know where else to put it so we're surrounded by Christians and I have great conversations and I developed this little end point where I'll talk to a Christian for a while and when I realize that they're getting tired and it's almost always before I am about talking about religion and they're going to leave I say you know what let's talk about for a moment something we can agree on we there's certain basic morals and ethical values that we share and we should focus on those things and make sure that we build on that and they said yeah yeah that's great so so let me give you a scenario you're in a dark alley in the middle of a foreign country you can't speak the language it's 3 o'clock in the morning you don't even know how you got there you're all alone and you're very concerned and very worried and out of the darkness comes an ogre 8 feet 2 inches tall 450 pounds of muscle except for the beer belly would ignore that and he grabs you from behind and lifts you off the ground and that's with one arm you are in big serious trouble and you can't move and with his free hand he puts up to the side of your head a gun and he leans over to your ear knee whispers do you love me and you're in such shock that the ogre explains to you that if you love him he will make you a cake and if you don't love him he's gonna shoot you in the head and turn you into a zombie so the big question is is this moral and every single time I've talked to a Christian about this they say no the ogre is not moral the augur is behaving immorally and I said see there's basic human values that we agree on whether we're religious or not religious now some of you may see where this is going but some of you may not the Christians don't I said let's change the rules a little bit no let's not change the rules let's change the parameters let's just magnify them instead of the ogre building you a cake he lets you live in a place of beauty and grace for all of eternity and if you don't love him he's going to send you into a lake of fire that you will burn over and over for all of eternity and they say oh well now you're talking about Christianity I say we agree to Isis that's magical and they go but that's different I just don't understand often at that point they say something like I gotta go and they stumble off and maybe it's just me being sadistic and poking fun of them or making them try to think but I'd like to think and maybe this is just self delusion at some point they go he had a point other atheists will tell me that we should just be quiet and stay in our rooms and I say we tried that for eighteen hundred years and didn't work so I'm just saying after that I figured we needed something fun and light-hearted so now we're gonna get into a little bit of the meat and potatoes of one of the points I want to make is how you can get to the children and the first time I gave this talk I was very concerned because I had never seen anyone do it before an atheist just 3040 years ago were you know mostly retired people that were free to say what they wanted to say and didn't have to worry about losing their jobs and now I'm taking a full circle and I'm saying you got to get to the kids and I don't mean just your kids I mean your nieces and nephews your younger siblings your neighbors kids you have to keep in mind what you can get away with personally without putting your life in jeopardy or perhaps the child's I had some neighbor boys come over that they know me and they know I'm an atheist I answer the door the Richard Dawkins a shirt on and one of the boys says oh you're the atheist right he may have never met an atheist knowingly if I hadn't been open they said but atheism is just another religion and inside I'm screaming and I want to grab them and go you stupid but instead I said you know that's a very thoughtful question I think I can explain why that's not true if you'll give me a couple minutes do you guys want to come inside sure okay so they came inside and we sat in my office and I showed him the brick Testament Bible is his brand in here he's out there selling books go buy some oh I love his work the Lego Bibles can't get enough of it and I show him things online I gave them each free copy of a Gideon's Bible because you get one free with each night stay I figure I cost the Gideons an extra dollar every time I steal and borrow it take one so I want you to do things that can help and one of the first things is Steve Spangler Science and since we're gonna talk about science I've got to get all science up in here so you know it's real science when you got a lab coat and since I take everything too far so I'm shedding tasty all right I need help from Derek Miller where is he Derek come on up Derek is the president of the Elan a secular Student Alliance one of the best one of the best student groups out there and we're gonna do a little experiment and it's to illustrate the Bernoulli principle and we got to make sure this is ready for you anyone ever heard of a diaper genie have you ever heard of a diaper don't worry about it I cleaned it out earlier it's fine it's not like I'm gonna ask you to put your mouth on it or anything so what I want you to do is take this open end and get some big breaths and try to fill it I only have an hour come on got a limp all right we've that's four for four and I'm gonna try now okay we're gonna get all the air out so it's fair so you can thank you it's the way it is in it I'm gonna try you ready how's that huh Thank You Derek give Derek a big hand he's been very helpful the first time I showed my kids my daughter was too old for her age says dad that's one hell of a condom I don't know I'm gonna put her in a convent other things you can do with Steve Spangler Science they have this neat kit where you get this little nozzle and some Mentos and all you got to do is buy your own two-liter bottle of coke what we're gonna do that a little later so don't don't go anywhere you've got to keep you in the seat so you don't to leave early and rest to your cars to see the football game oh wait it's 10:00 steve Spangler science also has books put out they make great things and matter of fact often while they're selling the products for money they will tell you about neat tricks like this diaper genie bag that you can go buy at a fraction of the cost so it's not always about them making money they really want you to teach science to kids so I love that website we had these little beads and my daughter a few years ago she had all the cheerleaders from school over to the house and we made friendship bead bracelets and they made them out of these white beads so just to make sure you're awake I'm gonna throw them at you are you ready they thought I was joking keep your eyes open they don't go as far as I was hoping all right here we go we got farther back no I got it oh yeah all right my life I'm still alive good so nice thing about these bracelets is that they're all white beads until they're exposed to sunlight hello one can't see below their neck that's not a bad sign I think it's good so they make these bracelets and I tell these young ladies and the cheerleading squad their secret bracelets and only they know the color combinations that they make and they go down on the basement where there's a black light on and they make these bracelets they come upstairs to the house with regular lights they turn back white you go outside they turn color again and they come up to they me these young girls who've already been taught that they're not meant for math and science which pisses me off and they say something like how does that work so simple they want they're asking me about the electromagnetic spectrum you know it's it's amazing little things like this that you can do and these aren't my kids and I'm not turning into into a theist by this a little event but I'm making them think and I take that as a teaching moment to tell them that science is cool science is fun it can do amazing things you should learn more about it hopefully it inspires them to do something then this kind of flows right into ass having them ask questions you want them to ask lots of questions and when our kids were young we had sciency videos on all the time you can't take a little kid and sit them and force them to watch a science video even the best ones can be a little a little dry not to me but to a kid they're very excitable just like me so you put them on the in the plate room and you just have them on don't soak it up it's just like watching Sesame Street they learn the alphabet and we have all these dinosaur things we have evolution box set planet Earth some of the most Vidya beautiful video photography you've ever seen in your life amazing so you got to teach them how the universe really works well we can have a little fun two cans we just we love this show and it's not realistic but it's fun so it gets them to question things and I even got my own little sonic screwdriver the kids bought me for one of my birthday's so it's great fun other things you can do watch movies about other religions mythologies teach them that Christianity is not the only religion out there I once had a pastor from the church that I used to pretend to be a Missouri senator Lutheran any Missouri Senate Lutheran's former Lutheran's okay got a few there not after three years of not talking about me what can we do to get you back to church and I think I said something back slightly snarky I would have to forget everything I know about physics chemistry astronomy plate tectonics history biology religion then you might have a fighting chance but I'd probably still find it illogical so I don't know what you do and I asked him if the Bible was inerrant and he said that not only is the Bible inerrant but it's self revealing which I had not heard before this moment self-revealing means that if you were to sit down without anyone around you or anything to disturb you and you just read the Bible from beginning to end you would be a Missouri Synod Lutheran because it's the one true religion and I asked him if the Bible is self revealing and reading it would make you a Missouri Synod Lutheran why is zero point zero zero three percent of the world's population Missouri Synod Lutheran he stopped emailing me a couple of suggestions for you agoura fantastic I think if I remember correctly it's just a Spanish movie they spent 80 million on it this is not a low-budget film could not get a distributor in the United States why because it painted Christians in a negative light I call truth you can have a little more fun with battles Troy Thor clash of titans the original please the new ones sucked ass I thought they had a moment where they were gonna redeem themselves when they pulled what was the little owls name what was it Bobo thank you and they pulled it out like yes the movies being redeemed it has a chance to go that some old junk and I threw it in the crate and I'll I should have walked out then I should have known there's also TV shows and this next one is one of my favorites they've spent an entire decade killing false deities do you like this show now they did not mess around and some of my nephews i buy them season one as a gift for their birthday when they're about 12 or 13 they're kind of into sci-fi hoping that they want season 2 season 3 or if nothing else they see 10 or 12 episodes whatever's in a season maybe it makes them think maybe it doesn't but it's still a nice gift I think scooby-doo now I know and some of you will tell me because you're atheist and you'll have to degrease agree with everything not all scooby-doo's are the same but the old-school scooby-doo where it was the janitor or the guy who ran the amusement park ride it was never really a ghost and they used comedy and levity and some few Scooby Snacks to prove that it always was something explainable in everything that happens in our world is explainable but at that moment you may not have the information to explain it that doesn't mean you can insert your random answer and just accept it so it's a beautiful lesson to teach the kids books there are some books out here today and my favorite of course I said already to the Legos you got to be a little careful they did take out the pornography which really kind of bummed me out but that's free on the internet but there's plenty of violence so get yourself a copy the author is here you could have him sign it he didn't pay me to do this I just love it that much here's a couple that I have in my presentation evolution by Daniel Loxton now if you've got really hard core funding families you may not be able to get away with giving this as a gift but if you've got a reasonably rational Christian family you give this to that child as a gift it is a gorgeous picture book with text explaining basic fundamentals of how biology and evolution work a beautiful beautiful book another simply gorgeous book the magic of reality I think this book is age-appropriate for all if you have a toddler you can read sections of this to them as they go to bed if they're 8 to 12 to 15 they can read it themselves and if you don't know the basic format there's 12 or 13 sections and each section picks a scientific topic like why do we have day or night and it discusses two or three world myths religions and then gives you the facts and Christianity does not hold a special place in this book I think it's only mentioned two or three times so the Christian parent probably won't be bothered by it much but the child will pick out that Christianity is just as silly as ancient Aztec religion just as logical as Roman and Greek mythology's letting go of God anybody heard this my little story in this I was in Arkansas for two years I call it hell for short and my wife and kids came down for one school year because I was only there two years temporarily and when this came out I bought my copy right away and it came from Amazon in a box and I opened it up and my wife who was a Missouri Senate Lutheran still not anymore but at the time saw this and said you're not gonna play that for the kids are you because religion has a special place it can't be discussed it can't be attacked yeah I wouldn't never I would not just for me I wouldn't I wouldn't do it well the first time me and the kids were in the car alone for two hours oopsie it's all I had so we listen to it and I didn't make a big deal out of it it's just what was on daddy wants to listen to this and they were you know 8 or 10 or 12 at the time and I didn't think much of it and a few weeks later we were driving through the backwoods of Missouri for some strange reason and we drove by this place called Fred's furniture and for those of you who have seen this or heard this there's a part where Julia sweetie talks about where they made God more personable by calling him Fred and they would say things like fred is love fred is love so we drive by Fred's furniture store and my kids in unison start saying Fred's is love Fred's is love and I'm driving and my wife goes what is that all about and my son the truthful son of a gun dad had us listen to this thing by Julia Sweeney a couple of days ago and it had this thing where God is love but they said Fred I'm driving honey I could go into a ditch don't tempt me I found out from my son a couple years later he told me that he had serious questions and doubts about Christianity but when this two-hour monologue finished he knew it was a lie you never know what's gonna be that final straw it's a beautiful funny touching heartfelt story and for my son it was the final straw that that made it the end of religion so I can never thank Julia Sweeney enough for that let's see what else we got here magic tricks oh I got I got had myself magic tricks I love magic tricks and there's quite a few magicians here there's lots of them I know Matt Dillahunty was doing a little experiment with magic last night to see how good he can be versus how drunk he can be so that was great I wish I got to see that for another hour to see it but I had to be here for all of you so thank you for coming early we got our daughter a little magic wand I can't remember the proper name of it it's a paddle stick with little beads on it anyone who does magic then we were in a magic shop and there's an actual magician working behind the counter showing you how it works and man it is amazing you just like how do you do that so we bought her one and she pulls out the instruction she runs to her room and she studies the instructions and she comes down to me and she goes I can't figure out how to make it work she thought there was some kind of physical mecanim mechanism some way to manipulate it to make it do what it looked like it was doing and I read the instructions and I was like oh I'm so embarrassed I should have known that myself how it worked and so I showed her and she's like it's just a trick throw the template on the table walks away so I said what can I have it she was sure I don't want it so when her friends would come over I'd practiced and I would show them the trick and they were amazed how did you do that how did you do that and she's like how can they fall for that how can they not see how it works and I go honey you didn't see how it worked until you saw how it worked can I have it back so for a while she showed her friends that it was great fun YouTube videos you know if you have the the younger generation in particular very video intensive they love images they love pictures they love videos share them a funny little video it doesn't have to be when it hits them over the head to start with something that'll get them to think and use your own judgment based on what you know of yourself and what you know of the young adult or the child that you're trying to get to thinking atheist fantastic high quality all the studio stuff love sets work Erin rah and I didn't put this in because he was going to be here but I loved Erin's stuff is he here yet this morning he's still sleeping off from last night to dark matter 2525 does more cartoony style very very fun stuff mr. Danny I have had Christian friends watch this and just laugh their butts off and they don't get it but they're still hearing the message it's fantastic atheist experience Matt who was doing the magic tricks last night a couple of hours every Sunday or so just explaining Christianity to Christians great great fun blogs there's so many of them but all you need to know about a skeptic money that took care of it I got links in the sidebar if you really get bored after you read all the posts no I there's plenty of them out there music to mention he was at the reason rally of course always great I went and saw in Chicago and we stood in line we got there really early and I'm in the front row and I had on a gray shirt with the Doctor Who angel on it right and the weeping angels you know like like this you know just I'm scared to see myself in the mirror kind of weeping angels and he's doing his concert about halfway through the concert he stops and he points right at me he goes what you you with the blue in your shirt what's your problem I'm like he was you're staring at me stop staring at me see now on you're scary man you what is that on your shirt anyway and so I'm trying to think how do I explain as I said there it's an angel and he goes that explains it nobody else knew it was a weeping angel from Doctor Who they just heard angels and he eviscerated me it was great I thanked him for that moment Shelly Segal the voice of an angel she is fantastic we had here last night George Rob did a great job if you don't know Roy Zimmerman you should learn him he does more political stuff but still religion very very clever and witty just like George Rob's man affect all four of them just brilliant Mentos you ready Mentos are you ready see Lauren thought I would actually do it on the stage I mean the Mentos thing we could do it outside yeah oh are you thirsty yeah well I walked in and the first guy gave me a million dollars do you guys get your million dollars if you came late you the Masons right now I got a million dollars oh there's something else in the back and then there's the second guy says just ask me I'll pray for you and I said I'm giving a speech in half an hour you pray for my speech no guess I'm I'm going to hell so you get the idea on that that this good fun and if the kids have never seen that it opens up those questions how does that work what makes that happen and you can actually get the Mythbusters episode where they do that and they built this special nozzle where they got it like 35 feet or something a custom-built nozzle just great fun experiments with chemistry optical illusions a friend of mine really kind of sad in a way but not for him so much but his mom was Jehovah's Witness and I think there was five siblings and his family him in for brothers and sisters all four of his brothers and sisters joined Jehovah's Witness and then realized that I was crap their mother will not talk to them she will not open their letters she will not recognize them if she sees them on the street she will not acknowledge their existence forever he became an atheist before he joined Jehovah's Witness and never joined she talks to him all the time because there's still hope for him her four other children had the truth and walked away from it the only logical explanation for that is that they're possessed by evil spirits and she doesn't want to risk being possessed by evil spirits so she can't communicate with them anyway I get off the side so one of the things that got him into this which made me think of the story is he loved optical oceans and he made a point of showing them to people that things aren't always what they seem another way to get young adults children to think so I have this picture of a famous actress and you know beautiful as always until you change the picture just a little did you catch that let's go back the entire time her eyes and mouth were upside down but when the picture was upside down your brain fixed it for most of you some of you saw right away but as it turns something in your brain goes something's wrong and there's a point where all of a sudden it becomes wrong and so again it's a great example there's lots of optical illusions you can share that show people that things aren't always what they seem so I love these interactive kind of things that goes all right let go porn sadly to get Brandon to forget his books published I talked to him yesterday he to take out the porn so I have some for you here this guy on the ground is drunk lot Sodom and Gomorrah remember that wife turned to a pillar assault or as Julia Sweeney would say the only way to get away from her husband they went and ran and hid in a cave and the daughters were just bereft that their father had no children they were women they don't count Bible lesson one women don't count in the Bible all they're good for is and making babies and so what do they do they get their daddy drunk the older sister has sex with them the next day she tells the younger sister it was pretty good time you should try it so blondie has a go and they both bare him airs so he has sons now yay for a lot the most moral man in all of Sodom and Gomorrah the only man worthy of being saved sleeps with his own kids unacceptable today perhaps this is the story of Moses at some point you see them in the background their God yabai his pointers not bright enough he shows up he's pissed at Moses for some reason he's gonna smite him with a lightning bolt cuz it's what gods did back then and Moses is like don't kill me please and Sephora his wife says I know how to protect my husband she grabs her little boy rips off his pants picks up a sharp rock from the ground and rips the skin off the tip of his dick and goes and rubs it on Moses his foot and God goes well shucks I can't kill him now and he leaves as JT would say dear Christian this is up alright I was gonna ask JT to marry me today I'm too late teach them about different cultures different religions around the world the more they know the silly or Christianity think it looks we live in a little small town that we're just moving out of that's why we bought the new house they live what I call a 15-mile lifestyle and anything beyond that 15 miles is a foreign land they got their church they got the family they got the friends they don't need to know anything else that scares me do not underestimate the power of religion to get to the kids I started off as a hardcore atheist just letting my kids get sprinkled with some water I didn't pay enough attention I blame myself and a few years later when I came back out and told my kids and I think they were 9 and 10 at the time my daughter and classical-style for her yeah whatever my son literally cried for 24 hours he did not sleep that night because when we were both dead I would not be with him in heaven and I let it get that far and I didn't even know it so you can do things to help kids that you know that you're related to that her neighbors it's really important and I thank you for your time

Channel: HamboneProductions

Views: 47,827

Rating: 4.6559634 out of 5

Keywords: Phil, Ferguson, skepticon 5, hambone production, how to, help kids, out of religion, leaving, church, science, for kids

Id: T1mNVBp1gR8

Length: 50min 33sec (3033 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 13 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/OGrilla]

It was corny and rude at times, but his style grew on me. By the end I was seriously in step and I appreciate his candor.

Such an important lesson for all of us to take.