Dan Barker Interviewed by Scott Burdick

it has a bite wasn't a fight beware it will ignite Oh what's your name and what's your religious belief Dan Barker atheist very good and have you always been an atheist no I was raised a believer my family was true believers door-to-door preachers singing in the choir preaching my dad went to Bible School we had Saturday morning Bible classes for the neighborhood children to convert them to Jesus so and then I went I became a preacher myself for years so what denomination what would you call what type of Christianity did you grow up in well my family's Christianity was eclectic we started out in the Christian Church when my dad was young and when I was a little boy but my parents were church hoppers for a long time because they couldn't find a church that was spiritual enough for them so we tried this for a while we were in the Church of the Nazarene for a while we were at a Baptist Church for a while we tried different churches until finally we settled on the charismatic movement there was an Assembly of God Church in California that became a charismatic Church which are these churches that sort of sort of break off from their main denomination and charismatic Saar a kind of Pentecostalism light you speak in tongues you have faith healing you have the gifts of the Spirit all of that and so in the meetings it wasn't just listening to a lecture about morality when we went to church we were evangelical Bible believing conservative fundamentalist but we were also in church too be with God and feel his presence and speak to him and feel the Angels and then cry in the spirit and all of that we weren't just there to learn we were there to live and experience God that was my whole upbringing and so your same n shindig speaking tongues did you have that experience yourself I did speak in tongues and I still can as an atheist which is kind of freaky I can go back into that mode and speak in tongues and reproduce all those feelings and it feels pretty good speaking in tongues for those who do it we must release some chemicals in the brain or it makes you feel peaceful joyful integrated with God you feel this kind of at least I felt this kind of parent figure up here telling me everything's fine and the world is good you know what I mean there was just this maybe you don't but if you if you've never done it you can't knock it because speaking in tongues and other forms of mysticism are very real powerful experiences inside the brain so I guess now you would say it's being created by your brain but I guess at the time you believed that it was coming through you from the spirit yeah if you're a believer and you are having a mystical experience which isn't that uncommon I think maybe half the population on the distribution curve half of us are kind of over here susceptible to mystical experiences if you believe in God or whatever your religion is and you're having that experience then it's affirming it's like proof that your beliefs are real and at the time I was convinced they pointed outside of nature that was something coming from above now I realize we can have those experiences but they're just coming from your brain they're an internal they don't necessarily point to anything outside of the natural world and that is interesting because you would think that having become an atheist you wouldn't be able to speak in tongues once you gave up your belief in God if that were the source of it yeah you would think so and I thought I was kind of weird for a while when I was a brand new baby atheist and I could still go back and do that maybe once a year I'll go back and try that but you know others might say the same thing about singing in a church choir a lifelong atheist David Randolph is a conductor at Carnegie Hall he loved Handel's Messiah he would perform it he had the world record for performing Handel's Messiah about he shall reign forever and ever and he didn't believe a word of it but he got tears in his eyes when he performed the religious music because it's really a human expression it's an artistic human expression and many of us are just we just like that our brains are just enjoy there's a lot of 80s who don't they don't know what the heck we're talking about but there's a lot of us over here who still we don't believe we know there's no God we know there's no spirit world and you know the human expression isn't amazing it's kind of like you don't have to be a Muslim to appreciate Islamic architecture you can look at it and go wow that's amazing when Muslims look at that they're thinking something different but when a non-muslim looks at it they're just thinking what a gorgeous human expression of yearning and hope and whatever that is that we're trying to do as human beings now when you were a Christian I assumed that the fundamentalist stranger and you didn't believe in you believe literally everything in the Bible the Adam and Eve story I didn't believe in evolution or any of that did you have any any doubts early on when you were growing up or even as an evangelical when I was young I had no doubts when I was a beginning preacher for at least 10 to 15 years I had no doubts at all fundamentalist evangelical fundamentalists Bible believing Christians like I was we know there's some metaphor in the Bible everybody knows that when Jesus said I am the door you don't look for hinges yeah I mean we know that there was when he said he was the Lamb of God you don't cut off the wool of Jesus right we know there is metaphor we even the most strict literalist Bible believer knows there's figures of speech in the Bible but the difference I think is where do you draw the line where do you say this is metaphorical and this isn't and for most Bible believers like my family if there's no explicit reference to it being a parable or metaphorical then we take it at face value so Adam and Eve were not presented as a parable they were presented as real historical people otherwise God is a liar and God cannot be a liar so that's the kind of believers we were we acknowledge metaphor but we realized that most of the Bible is truly literally factual if I known this for more than three or four years I don't know how I would deal with this I might overload in my head would explode in a figurative way like you know I would be able to deal with that go Looney or whatever not that you know but the Lord's kept in my head when love will have no doubts 100% same here I just sent in my heart of hearts in my truth I believe that tomorrow is the last day you know I traveled with the the Harold Camping group in their motorhomes for the last three days of the world filming them and they were absolutely certain the end of the world was coming you know the next day is this a belief that you held as far as the end times being near when you were a Christian we did believe the end of the world was imminent it was right around the corner like a thief in the night no man knows the hour and I remember thinking as a young believer in the family and then later how lucky I was that I was born not only in the right religion and the right family in the right country but also in the right time of history because the world was going to end any minute and I got to be a soldier in the army of Christ bringing people in at that last second it was a very exciting feeling and there's some kind of an arrogance in the mind of not all but many Christians and it's always been even since the day of Jesus who said there will be some disciples who won't die before the in comes and Paul who said it would be quick the Miller writes in the 1830s and the the Jehovah's Witnesses in 1914 or 1925 and so on and then Harold Camping in his group we were like that we thought it could be tonight and that's a powerful evangelical tool to go up to somebody and say you know Jesus might return tonight and if he does will you be ready and a lot of people go and so that's that's a good way to convert to be a missionary it's almost a conversion through fear tactic yeah I saw it myself personally it is it's a fear fear tactic do I want to go to hell is this the end have I been complacent and ignoring all this time and then it's going to be too late and then I'm going to regret that I didn't give my life to Jesus when I had a chance so there will be a time Jesus is love but after that point forget it you're going to burn you don't want to wait to see that it's going to happen and then do something because then it's for sure going to be too late and I guess it changes your whole focus where you're thinking very short-term rather than thinking of your whole life or looking to preserve the environment for future generations and it's a whole different way I guess of perceiving the world that's true there was a him we used to sing this world is not my home I'm just a passing through my treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the view somewhere beyond the blue so you know like James Watts under Reagan considered the environment it's just sort of a doormat for a future life it doesn't matter what we do in this world and that's how I thought the world's going to end I don't need to get educated I don't even have to go to college I didn't have to plan for the future even when Jesus said in the Bible take no thought for tomorrow right now this is what we had to do so it is short-sighted and it's reckless we didn't plan we didn't have savings we didn't we didn't have we lived by faith for eight years I and my new wife and little kid we were driving around the country preaching the end of the world in the gospel and no health insurance no you know our furniture was in storage we were just driving around from church to church trying to get one more soul into the kingdom before the world ended and you know I regret that I suppose I would have done it the same way but that's the mindset that a lot not all the mindset that a lot of believers have so I am curious about why do you think that was such an attractive thing to you into so many people this idea of the end of the world I mean even people who aren't religious are now waiting for 2012 and these sorts of things it seems to be such a universal yearning for humans there is that yearning I don't know if it's universal but I think there's a subset in many religions depending on your psychology but you feel special you feel like you know something you feel like you're living in a special time you feel like you get to be called to be on the front line of this cause that you that your life might not have as much meaning as you would like it to but this gives your life really special meaning we're moving on maybe maybe it's the great immigrant story we're going to move on from this country that we live in it isn't quite right we want to get out of here so let's move on to a paradise somewhere else maybe European immigrants to the US felt something like that we're moving we're going utopia yeah something I'm but even even if you don't have those feelings as a believer it's true regardless of whether you like it or want it or not if it's true if there is going to be a Judgment Day if the Bible is right then we better knuckle down and get busy about it gets serious about this issue the world's going to end in our eternal destinies and our soul is much more important than what you majored in college or I think I want to be an architect so I can build buildings but those buildings aren't going to last forever they're going to fall apart right but your eternal destiny what's more important in someone's eternal destiny so there's this psychological it's not an AHA it's kind of a that's almost an arrogance I get to be a part of the front line of this special message to the world it chosen people know yeah and it gives you meaning we pretended we were humble servants I'm a humble servant of Jesus I'm just following the Lord but you better get along with us or you're gonna burn so it's this double feelings you have you tend to be humble but you're really arrogant because I've been chosen by the creator of the cosmos to be one of his spokespeople so I mean is that humility or what is that she says dad I wanted to apologize and I said I would for she says that I've been very selfish I said I said what do you mean I don't understand she said dad you know when I was making you feel bad that you weren't around on the weekends and you were always out doing you know passing out tracts and warning people I was selfish dad I wanted you to spend time with me and now that I understand why you're doing this I wanted to say I'm sorry I almost broke into tears after she said this to me I do having a new earth is just what just what the doctor would order at the time when you were a Christian and if somebody were to have asked you had did Joshua do the moral thing and killing and women and children of whole villages of the Canaanites because God ordered this or Abraham being ordered to kill his own son I mean at that time would you have said that that was moral and would you have answered that question of would you have done such a thing in the positive if you had asked me back then if it was moral I wouldn't have known what the word moral meant I would have said it was the right thing to do because it's godly the question of morality I would have thought was some kind of a human question and whether it's whether it's morally permissible is something for philosophy class but if it's godly if it's holy no matter what it is even if we humans don't like it it's the right thing to do because God's saying to do it for example nobody thinks we should take a needle and poke it into a baby unless that baby needs a life-saving injection then we create the harm we caused the pain we make the baby cry and the baby doesn't know what the heck's happening why are you poking me with a needle I don't like to stop doing that so believers like I was would think we are the baby we don't understand the universe but the father figure up there does know that for our own good the needle has to be poked this damage has to be done what we think is a horrible thing that we don't like and we admit we don't like it we don't think we should kill people we don't think human beings should have the authority to commit genocide but because God is bigger and knows everything that godly thing to do is do what God says because what if we disobey what if what if the baby gets its way and the needle is not poked into the baby then the baby is going to suffer an even worse fate so that's how I was thinking was kind of a rationalizing of shifting the responsibility for my actions off of my own human moral judgment which could be faulty or could be wrong taking that out of the equation and not even asking if it's moral but asking if it's the right godly thing to do in that case I would say yes God should have done it and his servants were justified in following the orders to do what the father figure told them to do so it's a transference of basically that you know that authority to decide what's right now that's right for example when I was a teenager if I had been drafted and I wasn't drafted into Vietnam because I got a ministerial exemption but if I had been drafted I remember thinking in my mind I don't want to pull a trigger and shoot people I don't think I should do that but it's not me pulling that trigger it's Uncle Sam pulling the trigger it's not me deciding who lives or dies it's my country deciding and so it's not really my fault I'm just doing I'm just following orders doing what God told me that's a dangerous mentality I think when you get into your mid 20s and 30s you start thinking wait a minute I'm not you know it's easy to draft young people and I think this whole mentality of godliness is a kind of delayed moral development it's kind of like I'm not going to think for myself so I would have said I would have said the genocides in the Bible were the right thing to do regardless of whether it was moral I might have even said it's immoral it's wrong by human standing but we don't judge by human stands we let God judge by his higher wisdom and so I guess you would have said if God ordered you to do the same thing to your own children or anything you would follow those orders exactly there's the danger of faith that's the danger of obedience that if I was convinced that God had told me to do this then it wasn't me doing it hey don't blame me it's the father and if there's a problem with what I'm doing it's his fault and you really want to get in trouble with the big daddy he's the one making these to sit do you really want to disobey your military superiors when they tell you to take a military action do you want to get in that kind of trouble fortunately there are some people who say yes I do there are some people who obey military disobey military orders and you and I might call them heroes right because who knows if it sergeant or who knows if the generals are actually doing the right thing but there's this sort of childish mentality that happens in many religions and with some young people who are in the military that I'm going to show what a good person I am and follow the orders and maybe earn the medals and earn heaven and that's how I fit into this world I don't have to think for myself and so what would you say now is there is there anybody who could order you to kill your own child that you would obey yeah there there's no way that would happen I mean I get suppose theoretically there's a point zero zero zero zero one probability that someone could make a case but it would have to be a rational case right there might be some weird impossible to imagine situation where if I don't do it the whole human race is going to die so maybe I should kill my own I mean there might be something like that I don't know but it would go against our human nature our altruistic empathetic caring nature that we have in our basic rational idea of respect for life so so know as like in Julia Sweeney's play if you've seen it if God tells you to kill your own son isn't the proper answer no no I will not kill my own son so many of us 80s and agnostics think we're better than God which are the place where if you created a hell then you go to hell you're then one who's immoral you're the one who's not caring about human life you're the one who's disregarding morality and I think there's the distinction there's a difference between morality and godliness godliness may be tremendously immoral and we have to choose do you want to be a moral person in which case you can't be a godly person if you're a moral person you will denounce God for his actions he's not Savior you follow him blindly absolutely without question always he asked Abraham to take his son up to the top of the mountain to slay him in obedience to God just to be obedient and do you think that Abraham was doing the right thing or being obedient to God absolutely if God tells you because you're talking about the God that can take your very breath away you do what you're told if you were back in Joshua's time and God gave you that order would you follow it I would hope so I would I would like to think that I would be strong enough to do I would be afraid not to because and it is hard sometimes God asked us to do nothing like that but sometimes when our own lies he asked us to make hard decisions and we have to at the end of the day you have to say am I going to please man I'm not going to please God how did that happen that you changed what was the first crack in your in your in your true faith I was a true believer and never imagined changing and what happened was after my musicals were published and Christian denominations that were different from mine were performing them I was invited to other churches and I learned there's not one Christianity there's thousands of little Christianity's there may be as many Christianity's as there are Christians and what happened was I didn't go from fundamentalist Christian overnight to atheist that was impossible I moved little by little across this continuum from the fundamentalist more toward a moderate it took about four or five years and some of the early questions I had were those questions about the Bible what is metaphor what is literal for example I met Christians who didn't think Adam and Eve were historical and I was shocked at first but they explained to me that well the prodigal son wasn't historical it was just a parable that wasn't true to illustrate a moral tale so the early Israelites made a parable about the human race in the fall and sin and Adam and Eve were just a parable they weren't really real people and now with what we know about evolution there couldn't have been an Adam and Eve so I remember some of those early questions and what happened was the Bible became less and less literal in more and more metaphorical and it just kept gradually moving as I talked to more pastors I talked to liberal pastors and eventually that line kept going up and up and so suddenly it wasn't just the prodigal son and it wasn't just Adam and Eve this big father figure in the Bible that character is also a metaphor God Himself is just a big human figure of speech and so the line popped up here and I realized well that's atheism that's what that is the whole thing is just a human expression to try to give meaning and but it was painful it was a it took four or five years of intellectually thinking it through and gradually you know I was thinking I'm becoming a more mature Christian I'm becoming a more sophisticated more subtle I don't have to be so hard and I was like the fundamentalist I can be it more you know what I mean because there's a lot of Christians who also dissed the fundamentalist those crazy literal as there they're not understanding the true message of the Bible in a more sophisticated way so I went through that whole process and tasted pretty much that whole continuum of Christianity until I got at the end and I dumped out the bathwater and I said hey there's no baby there it's just all one huge figure of speech I find that interesting because when when I interviewed James Dunne for example who had you know he's along that continuum he's just not made that final step in the sames with them Reverend Barry Lynch when I've interviewed him and you know they are very questioning doubtful people and they aren't certain about anything that they won't say they're 100% certain even that Jesus rose from the dead or that heaven exists and so it is fascinating they've come along that continuum as well and then they just kind of stopped at a certain point and I find that many people I grew up Catholic and we didn't have the Adam and Eve story but then we were pretty literal on everything else and so it is interesting well those liberal believers are very smart and they're very caring and they're very good people and at least we atheists are happy that they are over here and not over there I mean that's an immense improvement for the world and we're not trying to convince them to make that final leap but some of us have made that leap right and it's fascinating because they may be because of the fact that they are not as literal and they have some doubt they're actually for things like separation of church and state and in those sorts of yes sorts of issues so yeah well people should be judged by their actions who cares what they believe even literalists who cares if they want to stand on their heads and pray in tongues to mother goose why do we care that's not important we judge people and even the Bible says that you shall know them by their fruits so the most of these most Christians even fundamentalist especially moderate and more liberal Christians they're good people they're really are good people and many of them are very smart and caring so what we atheist should care about is how they live their lives we shouldn't be judging them how can you be so stupid to still believe in a god that's that's irrelevant how do you treat other people do you work for civil rights do you work for gay marriage do you work for separation of church and state let's march in the same marches and and get along in this world it seems though that you almost have to have a little bit of doubt about the certainty of what the Bible or God wants you to to be that generous to other people's beliefs at least the people that I found who are fighting against gay rights and interviewed our state representative who was the one who started this amendment one fight you know too and he on camera you know said that he would bring back the anti sodomy laws to lock up homosexuals he is certain he is absolutely certain the literalness of the Bible and I think that precludes him being generous to other people's doubts or believes that I think that's true the fundamentalist or whatever you want to call the extreme conservatives have this certainty they have what I used to have I call it binary brains it's either the Bible says it should be cold or hot because if it's lukewarm I'll spit you out of my mouth so a fundamentalist in any religion is an absolute istic binary brain where there's no middle there can't be so it's either right or wrong yes or no black or white and so in the minds of these fundamentals who are absolutely certain they can't admit any possible gray area because that would mean God is half holy God is half right I think with the Liberals I don't know if it's so much doubt that they have as it is tolerance many of the liberals probably think these other believers are wrong but let's allow that whereas the fundamentalists don't want to allow that it's heaven or hell you choose God is God is perfect and holiness is perfect there's no gray area holiness within the world you have to choose and I think that betrays an insecurity in their thinking that their own minds have to be so locked binary hard that they can't consider alternatives it's an arrogance I am right and I'm always right in my way of thinking is the right way after centuries of religious fights in religious warfare I'm the guy that's going to tell the world what the Bible actually means that's a that's not a humble servant of anybody that's arrogant and it's interesting hearing you say that you know there was a lot of fear in your coming to this conclusion I imagine your family were all fundamentalist as well as your wife and children and all your friends and colleagues how did you deal with letting them know that you've gone through this change I sent out a letter in January of 84 to everybody I thought the simplest thing would be just to put it on the table a one-page letter which I reproduce in my book God list that just says I'm not a believer anymore and some of those Christian friends back then responded very nicely and we're still friends today it was wonderful to discover that we were really friends real friendship is an admiration for each other as people and some of them today we still like each other we get along we don't meet as much as we would like to but some of the others responded in this horrible ugly way it was surprising and painful to discover I guess we really weren't friends in the first place if we couldn't whether something like that if the friendship was conditional then is that a friendship and then did you really lose anything at all my Christian marriage fell apart largely because of this issue she viewed herself as a minister's wife she later remarried a Baptist ministers so you could see that her mind there were some lines that could not be crossed to her credit she did try to bend and try to learn but she had some lines that could not be crossed and so the marriage ended and that's always painful but it was good in the beginning when we agreed with each other and we we have four great children from that marriage so it wasn't like it was a bad marriage but at the end people grow people change and what happens when one change in one doesn't there's a minister in Raleigh North Carolina who his wife pretty much went through the process the same time he did and they're very fortunate they both realized at the same time he left the ministry and she's glad he did so that didn't happen with me you never know what's going to happen but my mom and dad were shocked at first they later both became atheists which is really fun my mom told a reporter it's great being an atheist I don't have to hate anymore my brother Darrell was always kind of a lousy Christian anyway he admits and he became a humanist and an atheist as well which was really surprising I wasn't trying to preach it my family the other boy Tom the brother the middle brother is still a born-again Christian and a great guy a retired high school principal and he's he's we call him the white sheep of the family he's just never understood what happened he probably thinks the devil has seduced us or he's praying for us and and that's fine he's sincere how about your children do you get to talk to them have they still remained Christians or yeah my the children from the Christian marriage Becky and Kristi and Andrea and Danny are they're really smart and sweet and good people they have kids of their own now and I don't think religion is that important I think maybe I don't know we don't talk about it too much but maybe maybe Becky and Kristi have some beliefs which is fine because they we judge them by their actions and other beliefs and I think Danny calls himself agnostic and Andrea came to the reason rally Andrea is an atheist a non-believer a humanist who really cares about human rights and she's so mad at how the church treats gays for example in that so Andrea not only got to go to the reason rally for the first time she went to any atheist event it was her first time in DC and she was like waking up in the world this is the world is a great place to be so your kids are always your kids and if you have a loving family then the differences shouldn't matter that much I know that myself when I I was brought up very strictly Catholic in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago and Catholic grade school Catholic high school with the Jesuits I did not know anybody who who didn't believe and I when I did come to the conclusion myself in high school just from reading that this was not true this was made up I felt very isolated and alone it wasn't until I went to art school on a scholarship that I met anybody else who didn't believe and I guess for you had you had you met people who were atheists before your conversion did they convert you or when was it than you you finally met a true atheist I changed my mind purely intellectually and all by myself we all know atheists but we just didn't know it so at the time that I became an atheist I may as well have been the only one in the world like you you know and didn't matter I wasn't thinking to join a club I didn't see some atheist evangelists on TV convinced me to jump on a bandwagon come on get with the rest of us because it's great atheism is fun I didn't even think it was that greater fun I didn't knowingly have any acquaintance with any other atheist in the world I knew theoretically that they must be out there but I think that's kind of good because it shows that our conclusions belong to us it wasn't like somebody convinced me it wasn't that I was reading any atheist writers later I did most of the work that I did was reading Christian writers most of the most of the scholarship that discredit Christianity comes from within Christianity so you don't have to go outside of your religion to tell your religion apart so and that's true with Islam - there's a lot of Islamic scholarship and of course Judaism you know there's in America most user atheists so when I became in 1984 it was actually 1983 when I knew it when I became this brand-new baby atheist I I was all by myself it was all alone and it was kind of scary but kind of fun maybe like a lone rock climber or a skydiver or something you're doing something exciting but you're all by yourself doing it it was only later nine months later that I knowingly met another atheist and that was on The Oprah Winfrey Show where I met Annie Laurie who are later married and we have a videotape of the day we met which is pretty cool and her mom and and another woman and if that was also the first time I publicly spoke about my atheism so there was all this stuff going on the first time I had ever put those words into sentences in front of an audience and it was also the first time I ever spoke before a hostile audience which I loved I thought that was great so how did the audience react Oprah had packed that audience with bible-thumpers it was great TV it really was interesting you know and so they were holding their big fat Bibles and yelling at us and one woman pointed in any losses you are a witch in any voice oh yeah you want to burn me at the stake is that what you say it was pretty it was pretty fascinating and I'm the kind of person that was energized I had always spoken before appreciative audiences as a minister and now I was actually saying something that was making a difference it felt like wow I could do this this is great and I've been doing it ever since folks please welcome the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and co-hosts a freethought radio Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker well hello are you glorious goddamned infidels I'm Annie Laurie Gaylor and I'm Dan Barker and we are co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and co-hosts a free thought radio what was the impetus to starting the clergy project the clergy project came together almost miraculously from a number of independent threads my part in it was that for many years I have met other clergy like myself and have 25 to 30 friends that we all kind of just informally share our stories and Daniel Dennett the philosopher in his colleague Linda Lou Scola who's a researcher did a study in 2010 about preachers who are not believers and I was able to funnel a few of my names to them including some active clergy that I hear from because they read godless and they're going through the same process now that I and our other former clergy were going through and so it's kind of like they were reaching out to us what's going to happen how do I tell my family how do I get a job what books did you read and it's just sort of an informal friendship of things happening so the dentist the scholar study came out and about the same time Richard Dawkins had also been talking about the fact that especially in Europe but all over the world there are a lot of clergy who are in the pulpit who don't believe and he and I had a brief talk in Copenhagen a couple years ago about what could we do and he Dennett and Richard Dawkins kind of casually said well why don't we start something like a scholarship to help retrain the clergy and and I kind of joked we could maybe call it ava preacher or redeem the clergy or something you know and to actually help you know and so all of these ideas sort of came together Lindell escola and robin Cornwell elizabeth Cornwell who's the president or director of the Richard Dawkins foundation and I we met in Washington DC at the Museum of the American Indian which is kind of fun to be there and we thought why don't we start something it wasn't even called the clergy project Richard Dawkins Foundation put up the money there was a lot of money to develop this secret online forum that we are now calling the clergy project and the Freedom From Religion Foundation contributed some resources and then a lot of time because was a lot of volunteer work and then a whole bunch of people just volunteered mostly X clergy like myself and others to make this thing work and it's amazing we started in March of 2011 with about 50 about 15 of those were active clergy and then in October of 2011 we went public with this public page the clergy project org where people can then make applications to join and after they are carefully screened then we let them into this private forum today there's about two hundred and twenty just a little more than a year later and we're getting applications all the time and the screening process is getting is getting cumbersome because so many are coming in and there's only seven of us now so we're looking for more screeners to try to because we want to make sure they're legit they're not trying to crash the thing they really are some kind of formal clergy ordained or whatever or licensed and they are truly non-supernatural they have truly abandoned complete supernatural beliefs in the then we invite them into the forum and then the forum has all this great dialogue going on on different levels there's a corner for the Liberals there's a corner for the fundamentalist and Pentecostals like Jerry DeWitt who was one of I think Jerry do what was the first actual graduate from the clergy but we call them graduates they were in the pulpit and then they got out while they were in the project and music philosophy practical career matters how did you find a job how can i some of it is mental health there's some depression some of it is marital counseling what can i how do i how does my marriage day to get all of these issues that are especially poignant to clergy male or female clergy who are in the pulpit and want to get out so I guess it is a moral dilemma because you know it's not just your decision to change your belief I mean it has implications for your family for your children they may be in school and and you know medical expenses insurance all of this stuff I guess could be threatened by your having out yeah well because being a minister isn't just a job you're doing like being a plumber you know being a CPA it's a you know that you might love or not it's not just what you do it's who you are i was a reverend i was respected in the community when i spoke people listened it was like I had a special kind of there's almost a special level of people in the country called the clergy that are it's a hierarchical thing and then when you lose that you're no longer here you're just a guy you're just a person and so there's all of that that goes along with it and then who's going to hire somebody with a Divinity degree in today's economy that's a big struggle there's a couple people in the clergy project who for more than two years have been atheists and they can't find an escape strategy they can't find a way out they want to they want to be honest these people want to tell their congregations they want to be people of integrity but they can't yet because health insurance one of them has a disabled wife whose condition is a pre-existing condition and if he tried to get another job he knows that she would not be covered so he has to keep going through the motions because he loves his family it's not that he wants to be a hypocrite it's not that he wants to stay in the church and rake up my he wants to get out but he's stuck there's a lot of stories like that and so the clergy project right now is just a common community where we're helping each other feel welcome eventually we hope to become an organization where we can actually raise funds to materially make a difference that's wonderful and how did you do that how did you bridge the gap between the two I mean what what kind of job did you take after giving up the ministry when I left the ministry I became a computer programmer which was amazingly lucky for me I took one class and before I even finished that one class I was hired as a sort of beginning level I loved it so much I just learning curved up and for two years or two-and-a-half years I was a programmer and an analyst working for the railroads which I thought was a blast so I was lucky and some of the others aren't that lucky but that gave me a chance into transition and then I went to work for the Freedom From Religion Foundation in 1987 and was there a time when you were still preaching when you still when you didn't believe anymore but you were still preaching what you knew people wanted to hear after I became an atheist I kept preaching for about four or five months from the summer of 83 up until December and I hated it I knew it was wrong I knew it was hypocritical it was kind of interesting that I did that because there was no difference in the audience in fact a woman came up to me after one sermon and said Reverend Barker the Spirit of God was on your ministry and I'm thinking it was because I didn't feel it but she was feeling it so and I had to stop I couldn't keep going in in December of 83 I said enough Sonata especially when I realized there was an atheist in that audience and here I was being a phony not just to other believers but to another atheist so in and in the clergy project we don't fault those clergy who are still in the ministry we understand we're sympathetic because we went through it too I know there are some atheists who say well quit being a phony just get out right now what we could do that but the the ethical consequences of that can be drastic it's kind of like if you know your marriage is ended you just walk out right now or is there a period of time when you are phonies for a while it's a bad marriage but you're having to work out the details so especially if you have children you know and so it's a similar thing the marriage is over and I'm going to have to get out but I've got to do this in some kind of I have to stay on my feet in some way others became philosophy professors which is a good fit a a large number of former clergy go into Social Work which is also a good fit Tom Reed in Madison Wisconsin a Mississippi Roman Catholic priest went into Social Work because he went into the priesthood to help people and that's the same reason he went out he really wanted to help people some of them sell insurance some of them start their own business some of them just get a job I just met a fellow a few days ago who said he was a pastor he's now grinding coffee and and I said well I think that's a higher calling so well the clergy project is not holding anybody's hands we all have to figure out our own lives and nobody wants our hands held but it can be really affirming to know that others have gone through it and have have turned out okay within just the last few years as I began to truly realize where I was at I was I was faced in with this dilemma of committing what I call identity suicide because now I realized who everyone thought I was I wasn't and so what do i do do I pretend to be that person for the sake of the mortgage to pretend to be that person for the sake of my community for all the people that I love what's it going to do to all those people that I've been ministering to all these years when suddenly their leader says something different and so it was it was a horrible process it was an extremely horrible process but thanks to the clergy project which is sponsored by the Dawkins Foundation which is ran by Dan Barker from Freedom From Religion the clergy project begins to connect me over the internet with ministers who also had lost their belief in the supernatural but were also trapped in the ministry and it gave me the encouragement he gave me some insights and I realized that my situation though it was desperate was it impossible and that I might do more than survive identity suicide I might actually thrive through it so I came out I came out on Facebook in October of last year about a hundred and sixty-five days ago now your your life almost seems very similar to when you were a traveling preacher now I'm you know you and evangelical atheist no yeah I guess I am an evangelical atheist and evangelism in the original Greek just means the good news so an angel is just a word messenger so the the motivation that took me out of the pulpit was the same motivation that put me in and we're not all preachers and it's probably good for the world that we're not all preacher types but I'm the kind of person who wants to know what's true and stand up and speak what's true so the pulpit for me was that way of speaking the truth then when I learned that Christianity is not true I didn't change I didn't become a different person that the conclusions changed but I still want to stand up and speak with truth and in that Oprah show was like the beginning of yeah I could still do this this is great it's and maybe psychologically there's something like a reverse penance going on maybe you know maybe I'm feeling like I have to undo the damage of those 19 years of preaching and so perhaps I think though now with 20 what 25 years now I think I've more than undone the damage but nothing wrong with speaking out in fact Christians would say don't be ashamed to stand up and speak what you think is the truth my parents told me that and that's a great lesson I learned from my fundamentalist parents stand up and say it who cares if they slam the door in your face who cares if they call you a fool the Bible says you will be persecuted and called fools so that means you're doing the right thing and so we at the Freedom From Religion Foundation we have that attitude if we're not getting persecuted if we're not getting the hate mail we're something wrong because we want to make a different we don't want to make people angry but that's one of the ways we know that the message is having some kind of an impact so I guess evangelical atheist is a compliment I guess I wonder as an atheist there are some things that we don't know yet science is hoping to find out do you ever yearn for that simpler way that you had of your mind of just feeling like you you knew the truth and was there was there a certain times when you look back and say wow that was all that was actually kind of I was very happy you know in that belief yeah that's a good question and it's similar to to remembering how peaceful and happy I was waiting for Santa Claus that was a great time of life I can't go back it will never go back and shouldn't go back because we develop right but I can look back and smile that was a fun time being four years old and and Santa was real and you know I'm not knocking it because that's where I was then as a four-year-old and maybe there's a little twinge of nostalgia for our childhood and I know Richard Dawkins has written that he thinks that little twinge for a return to the securities of childhood is part of the motivation behind faith because we have the sorted as as a species we're slow developers compared to other species and so there's a yearning for that time when mommy and daddy would tell you what to do when everything was simple and then you could just get your orders from mommy and daddy and life was like that so yeah there's some kind of a psychological yearning but intellectually there's no desire intellectually most atheists find peace and humility knowing that we don't know that's a totally different thing it's okay not to know in fact not knowing is what drives science if we had all the answers there'd be no science we would just look everything up in a table somewhere right so it's the quest it's the it's the admission of ignorance it the acknowledgement of humility in the face of this big wide vast who knows how big our ignorance is that's exciting and peaceful at the same time because then we can stop pretending we can stop imagining that it's all about me I've been called by these spiritual powers to become this great cosmic leader e evangelist you know you get knocked down a few notches and I realize I'm just as biological organism I'm an animal in a natural environment and that's enough do you remember when you found out that there wasn't a Santa Santa Claus yeah I remember yeah well what was your reactors kind of disappointing yeah did you feel like your parents had lied to you you know I didn't I didn't worry I don't know I didn't worry about it too much but I know some kids and that traumatic yeah it was a little traumatic yeah and I had one friend of mine his their son asked when he was little he said the Santa Claus real like Jesus is real oh very thoughtful question yeah very good question when I was a child I thought of childish things eternal life with angel witness a father up in heaven who would hover over me tell me what to think tell me what to do but now that I have grown it's time to use my own good mind out of you if the only way you can accept acclaim is by faith then you're admitting that that claim cannot be accepted on its own merits there's something weak about the claim because if the claim is substantiated with evidence and scholarly consensus and so on then you don't invoke faith we don't use faith for things that we are sure we only use faith for things that we are ignorant of in fact the word believe is often an expression of doubt what time is it it's 1:30 I believe we use believe in faith for uncertainty and somehow in the religious scheme that gets flipped upside down and being uncertain is a virtue so faith really is it really is a cop-out it's a way of saying ah I'd like to believe this is true and I don't have any good reason on its own so I'm going to it's going to be true by faith and isn't that great by faith it's almost wishful thinking it is and if you think about it at all if faith is a valid tool of knowledge if it is then anything goes anything can be true by faith as a Christian apologist I would have said well not anything can be true it has to be logically coherent but then there has to be enough evidence there has to be a certain threshold of evidence from which we can make a leap of faith and I used to think the resurrection story the empty tomb was enough it wasn't proof but it was enough evidence to say AHA we're going to make a leap of faith beyond that but that's not how historians work honest historians honest historians would say if there's a 10 percent likelihood of the resurrection stories being true then there's a 90 percent likelihood that they're not you don't make this leap of faith you go with their probabilities and if you have to round it off a 10 percent likelihood means you would round it off to zero if you to round it off so that's intellectual honesty that cuts across the grain of what we would like to be true because we want to feel special we want life after death we want a father figure giving us peace and love and moral direction and we think that if we don't have that our lives would fall apart so that's why faith is a cop-out it's the cheap lazy way to arrive at what you think is true well I guess that is pretty much the central tenet of Christianity is the resurrection Jesus rising from the dead what what do you think is there a possibility that this did actually happen we do know that there is an immense propensity among human beings today and in the past and even admittedly in the New Testament itself this propensity to exaggerate to interpolate to create myths to tell lies for example in the New Testament Paul warns the readers be aware of those Christians who are pretending to write letters as if they were from me Paul admitted that early Christians were in the habit of lying and producing forgeries Bartram and brings that point out in his new book forged so even in the very beginning we know from the beginning of Christian history all the way till today there has been this immense temptation to exaggerator to create myths out of out of nothing so that doesn't disprove the resurrection but when you consider that possibility that high likelihood that human beings are doing that against the possibility that there actually was a dead person for three days who then came out of the grave and the Sun was darkened for three hours during the middle of the day during a time when there could not have been any clips of the Sun because the moon was a full moon and when you consider all these possibilities and you say thanks' rising from the dead yeah I'm grave and walking through the city when you say okay all of those things could have happened the mistake a lot of people make is to replace it could have happened we it did happen because if this 10% let's say most of us would put it down to maybe 1% but whatever it is it could have happened no atheist can disprove the resurrection maybe there's some weird thing we don't know but just to say that something fits and could have happened is not to say that it did to be honest you have to factor in everything else we know about history about people exaggerating mistakes could be a simple mistake could be a misinterpretation we have to factor all of that into our balanced equation and when we have to say did Jesus actually rise from the dead well maybe he could have but to say that is to say it's much more likely that he didn't for all these known reasons we have all of our background knowledge let's say about what we know could or couldn't happen so nobody's saying any historical truth is 0% or 100% but the resurrection of Jesus is such a low probability that for all practical purposes we can round it off to 0 and say no that that didn't happen we even know the stories themselves were elaborated the stories themselves in the New Testament started out simple but as time passed a later gospel writer would make it a little more amazing and then 15 years later Matthew and Luke come along and make it even more amazing and then when you get to John 60 years later wow this is incredible so you can actually see a legendary growth in history as the story is being told when you factor that into this and you unpack at all you realize that the evidence we really do have for the resurrection is so slim what it amounts to is a story a story could be true but all we've got is a story well and it's not even a completely original story when you look at all the I know in high school that was kind of one of the things that started me thinking was wow look at all these other religions that had very similar stories of bringing people back to life from the dead or Ganesh being brought back to life with a miracle and even turning water into wine you know the Greeks had these miracles of our gods and so that even looked almost like a negative as evidence you know the fact that they might be borrowing these from their religions Dionysus was a God man who died who had an empty tomb who turned water into wine and so on so in addition to all those reasons why we might doubt the likelihood of the story there's the pagan parallels that preceded that that make it seem as if the Jesus story were cut from the same fabric as other ancient stories and there's also the internal contradictions within the story the Gospel writers themselves the worst example anyone could ever come up with to prove the reliability of the Bible is the resurrection it's given five times at least five times in the Bible and in the New Testament they don't agree with each other they contradict each other on so many points and in my book godless I give 17 of those contradictions about what even fundamentalist scholars have to throw up their hands and say whoa there's something's wrong here something's got to give because they cannot all have been right so all of the legendary growth what we know that our background knowledge of what we know about human nature the pagan parallels that make it look like the resurrection came from earlier beliefs and the internal contradictions vastly dropped the probabilities that the resurrection really happened Josephus wrote his antiquities of the Jews after the Year 90 which was at least 60 years after the supposed event and that little paragraph about Jesus appears in this most unlikely place it doesn't flow for one thing so it looks like it was just stuck in and that little paragraph about Josephus that little paragraph about Jesus in Josephus actually doesn't show up until the 4th century there's no evidence that anyone ever knew about or quoted that at the time of Eusebius who some scholars call the most thoroughly dishonest historian of antiquity Eusebius suddenly tells us oh by the way in the works of Josephus there's a paragraph about Jesus the wording is from a later time the way it's phrased is strange Josephus was a belief a Messianic Jew so if Jesus had been the fulfillment of prophecy as he says there he would have devoted more than a couple sentences to him in his entire opus you know he didn't he didn't tell us what prophecies he was the fulfillment of and Josephus could have he was smart enough and and on and on even even most fundamental scholars admit that that little paragraph that the only thing from the first century outside the Bible that might corroborate Jesus that little paragraph was probably entirely interpolated or it was edited from an earlier simpler thing so you're right where do you draw the line and so it's perfectly consistent with what we know about history to imagine that that was just stuck in later we know that happened in the church the Catholic Church invented the that verse about the Trinity they just stuck it into the Latin Vulgate out of thin air they attempt 'red with the scripture so since Christians have exhibited historically this tendency to tamper with their documents to change them it's consistent to imagine that that could have happened also with Josephus you can't prove it either way but it's very flimsy evidence for Jesus I want to thank me every and every one here because this community has been more amazing to me than I've never imagined they're a sport they supported me when really no one else would have support from other organizations of course but when all the hate started rolling in the Echo Park was one of the best people or organizations in my life and they helped me tremendously they made me feel accepted where I located before and they brought me into this community in such a big way and that means everything to make this change what is the Freedom From Religion Foundation what do you do the Freedom From Religion Foundation is a National Organization of free thinkers atheists and agnostics mainly although we're open to anybody who supports our purposes which are number one to keep religion and government separates and number two to educate the public about the views of non-believers so we concentrate mostly on the first purpose of state church separation although we also do a lot of the educational and we do it through legal action through letters through lawsuits through educational activities we've always had a number of lawsuits in the courts right now we have ten that are going federal to state lawsuits at state level lawsuits challenging everything from the National Day of Prayer to the parsonage exclusion for taxes for clergy nativity scenes on public property a Christian cross on top of a water tower in the city Jesus monument in Montana high school credit being given to off-campus religious education and over the years we've had more than 50 lawsuits we started in the 1970s 1978 became a national organization non-profit we just hired our fourth full-time attorney which is pretty amazing grow up for us in the last seven or eight years the growth of our group the growth of all the groups I think in America is just really steep right now so we're over 18,000 but eighteen and a half thousand members we have thirteen full-time staff and we're outgrowing our building and it's everything from working on a lawsuit which is really fun to national media in publishing books in our newspaper in our national weekly radio show free thought radio public speaking debates and most of the people that interviewed in my town they pretty much say that your being working for the devil and that you know your you know what you're doing is against God and that you're against Christians and that you are trying to oppress them and destroy the country and I imagine there must be some you must get some hate mail there must be some people who aren't too happy with with what you're doing we do get a lot of hate mail in fact we often publish a page of what we call crank mail which some of our readers love and some of them hate you know but the crank mail from believers in fact there's a young woman who actually reads it on YouTube she reads the entire FFRF crank mail and some of it we can't even say I mean some of it's horrible we know that this doesn't represent all Christians we know that it's just the the cranks in the religion but it does show you the the hatred and the insecurity among a lot of believers when you're doing something against what they think is precious that they have to resort to ad hominem I even had a debate opponent once say I was demon-possessed maybe because I was doing such a good job you know so I took it as a compliment so when they say we're working for the devil we're not because there's no devil we take it as a sign of success we are being noticed there they are upset with the fact that their precious views are being challenged so about a month ago back the day before the reason rally we got an envelope in the mail our staff member opened it it was human feces sent from somebody who read our New York Times full-page ad about asking liberal Catholics to leave the church and the the police came into the office to get Mel's fingerprints for the envelope so they could find out because there's some kind of a federal crime to do that it's probably a hate crime and all of that and after doing that the police officer joined the foundation thinking this is a great group I like what you guys are doing so we had a dead fish in the mail once we get an awful lot of phone calls and some of them are death threats and even though we might want it we might not want to take in this seriously because we know they're just people blowing off their mad the police have told us they want to be informed of any threat like that so we have to report a number of times every year we have to report that there's threats coming in and we know there's a risk but any group that's advocating for any cause is going to have enemies so it's not like but it does seem that atheists are among the most hated why do you think atheists are so hated I mean if it's somebody from a different religion they obviously don't believe what you believe is true why are atheists more than anybody else so universally despised it seems yeah when I was a preacher I used to feel ambivalent about Muslims let's say they're totally wrong and they're not going to heaven but at least they believe in God so there's some hope for them maybe we they believe in God and we could switch them to the right God right so there's at least that Jews are wrong but they believe in God of the Bible so we could convert Jews you know there's that attitude but atheists there's no hope an atheist doesn't believe in God and so what the atheist is saying is that my hope for eternal life is wrong atheists are telling me as a believer that I'm not going to see grandma in heaven someday I love grandma and I want to see grandma and they're telling me that my hope to see her is is incorrect and stupid and wrong so atheism sort of cuts at the core of the conservative believers it cuts them so deeply of who they are and what they hope for what their life's all about that we must be extreme evil devil worshiper Satan you know I mean they in their minds we must be the possible worst of the worst and you see that in society right now atheists are still at the bottom of the totem pole about who you would trust for example to be President of the United States so well then I find that even people who aren't that upset that I'm an atheist their question is well that's fine but if you have kids you surely going to grow bring them up in a religion at least and I think it's that that unspoken thing that you can't have morals if you're an atheist if you don't believe in God I think that may also contribute to my people I know some of the people because I am one of the few out atheists in the in the art world I'm always having other artists come up to me and say very well-known artists oh I'm an atheist too you know but I can't say you know and but then I have other people or Christian who are so shocked and they say I can't believe you're an atheist um you're so moral though and so you do all this charity work and things so I think it's that it's showing that they think that you can't have morals if you're if you're anything well and doesn't your inspiration for your art come from on high you hear that sometimes you know aren't you inspired by something outside of yourself you know oh yeah we'll say all the great art in history was done by by Christian artists and I of course always come back wha how do you know I mean through most of history if they were really didn't believe they would be put to the put to death or they would not get any Commission and skew them from the church or yeah I mean there's probably been a lot of doubters that we have no idea that they were yeah so well and and I'll have to check my facts on this but I think there were a lot of painters I think Turner was a non-believer and and others but I do know in the field of music an awful lot of atheists and agnostics have been involved even writing religious music Ray Vaughan Williams was an atheist and he wrote hymns in the English hymnal and he said well if you got to go to church you may as well listen to good music you know so a lot of the music was commissioned if you're going to make a living back then you you write for who's paying and it was either the king or the nobility or the church they were the ones paying for the music so there was an awful lot of religious music written more for the stomach than for them for the spirit so it was um and we know that even Handel's Messiah was recycled secular melodies a lot of it was and three requiems three requiems based on the Bible Brahms and Berlioz and Verity each wrote these records none of them were believers they were using the Bible as a text just as they would use pagan sources as a text or any other source and Brahms admitted you know there's some parts of the Bible I'm not going to use I won't go that far but he he wrote his Requiem based on you know because what he going to do you're going to write a Christian Requiem and you're going to use the Bible that doesn't mean they were inspired by God it doesn't mean they were writing religious music for religious purposes they were writing human music I guess the idea question about bringing up my children too we don't have children but I guess you'd be the perfect test case because you brought up children as Christians and you you have another daughter that you brought up as an 8-byte not as an atheist but in an atheist household I guess you didn't bring her to church did she come out much less moral than the others our Sabrina our daughter is a fourth generation atheist and when we say we brought her up as an atheist that doesn't mean that we indoctrinated her we didn't have Sunday morning memorized Bertrand Russell you know and that kind of stuff I like what she had to pass some Creed or something she was just free to be herself and indirectly she heard our views and she was free to make up her own mind and she's a very strong free thinker and we're happy we're happy when our daughter wins an argument against us that means there's hope for the future that we don't have we don't have to be right about everything you can learn from your children and so I think most Christian families who raise their children in the church what they're really doing they're not giving them religious moral training they're just giving them human moral training the human values transcend all the religions that's why Muslim families can raise good children that's why Jewish and Christian and Buddhist and Hindu families can raise good children because the value they're tapping into it they're not religious values at all there's this common sort of transcendent human value that in fact it's the same values by which we judge a religion in the first place to be good or bad you don't use the framework within the religion to say oh that's a good religion we're using an overview human value human nature we kind to other human beings do we value peace do we want love do we want cooperation do we want less violence in the world those are the things we use and so I think 95% of Christian families who are raising good kids are doing them on humanistic principles because the Bible doesn't have much of that at all in fact the Bible is a very bad moral guide there's a couple good things in the Bible and Thomas Jefferson admitted he took a pair of scissors and Thomas Jefferson said yeah there are some good teachings in the Bible but it's like these are his words it's like digging through a dunghill to find a diamond and he found some diamonds and I think a lot of Christians they just pick out the diamonds from the Bible which are there and then they say that's that's the Christian scheme when it really those diamonds are human values so our daughter Sabrina is a human being and you know we didn't stop her from going to church with her friends we didn't stop her from reading the Bible we didn't say you can't do this use your own mind and she like most good Christian Jewish Muslim kids has grown up as a well-rounded human being Cary's I'm your neighborhood previous more last week if you're friendly resolute secular humanist I'm not afraid of me if you want me to fry is it really that david barton is creating these beliefs or is it that they want to believe something and so they're going to make somebody like him famous who's willing to create the lies for them yeah i remember that feeling as a preacher to only read and trust the books written by people who agree with my theology because i was in the business of promoting my theology to the world as a lot of conservative christians are there in that business of promoting it so what you want is everything that supports and confirms and helps you win your arguments so some book that's critical isn't going to help you but a book like david barton in a book that says this thing it does help your argument and even if it turns out to be untruthful paul said something like that in the new testament even if my lie helps to bring people into christ that's more important in if it turns out that it's not exactly right well doesn't matter because if we can get people to believe and follow us that's what's most important and those details don't matter as much so i actually know there are some atheist that are same way there's something in human nature I've talked to atheists who have looked at some of my debates you know that I've done that are online and they said they listened to my statements and then they fast-forward through everything the other person says and they just want to get to the stuff that I said which I guess it's kind of economical but that's also unfair we should listen to all sides we should be open to just let's hear what the people say who we agree with but let's also hear the the disagreement otherwise how was anyone ever going to learn anything there's this tendency that we have in our brains no matter who we are to cheerlead for what we for our own pet theories and that's dangerous it's kind of yeah that confirmation bias and it also kind of seems to stem from what you had mentioned in your book about that it's your starting point and a lot of Christians starting point is God that that is true that that exists the Bible is true and then everything else follows from that for first assumption so yeah I guess you're right but but now what I say and what we say at the Freedom From Religion Foundation if it's not true why believe it the most important question that should be asked of any religion is is it true when I was in Pennsylvania last week we were doing a march for atheism and a Christian man came up to me almost with tears in his eyes and he's saying you were a preacher can you tell me I mean can you just tell me what went wrong just can you summarize it and I said yes I learned that Christianity is not true and if something is not true I'm going to stop preaching it does that make sense to you and you looked at many said well that's honest okay thank you and then you walked away so instead of spending two hours arguing all the facts just if it's not true stop believing it that's hard for people to do because that means they have to give up so much of what they think they are as people in their hope for the future so well and what I took away from a lot of the talks at the recent rally and and from your book is that you're not necessarily trying to tell people what they should or shouldn't believe you're trying to teach them how to use reason and how to think and evaluate on their own and then they'll come to those conclusions that's exactly right we a theists are not committed a priori to some truth that there is no God that's not a doctrine that's not a dogma we are committed to reason and I will admit that I would go back to believing in God if there's good reason for it if there is a God that would be an amazing thing to know I would want to know that I would have a thousand questions to ask of this God I might even ask it to apologize you know but still if there's a God that's that would be a fact of reality that we should all want to know so we're not close-minded we don't have our heads stuck in this and like no I don't want any moral restrictions in my life so I'm going to refuse to believe in this God who tells me that I can't be gay or that I can't do this you know so you're absolutely right most of us atheists are not so much preaching atheism we say it's a conclusion we have but what we are preaching is reason and human morality as opposed to absolutist ik authoritarian morality a morality that lets us think about the situations and we think there's so much more progress to be made so much more to be learned with that attitude than blind faith whether you're an atheist or an agnostic or skeptic or rationalist or whatever you like to call yourself we all disbelieve in the same gods I think coming out as a free thinker is one of the most revolutionary acts of an unbeliever today it is time to tell it like it is about religion the emperor has no clothes what is in your mind the difference between an atheistic and agnostic I think on that question George Smith sums it up really nicely in his book atheism the case against God you can be both almost all agnostics are atheists you can be atheist and agnostic if atheism is not some middle ground between belief and non belief agnosticism a lot of people use it as a kind of handy I'm just not going to decide now but actually agnosticism addresses what you know or you claim you can know it's a knowledge question atheism and theism are not a knowledge question atheism and theism are our belief question it addresses what you believe or you think you should believe so you can be and should be both in fact there are some agnostics who are theists like Pascal Pascal the philosopher mathematician said we can't know and maybe we won't ever know and I don't know if my Roman Catholic beliefs are true but I'm going to choose to believe you know Pascal's wager I'm going to believe anyway so that's honest he's saying I'm an agnostic but I'm believing most agnostics like me say I'm an agnostic I don't know but I'm not not believing atheism isn't a knowledge claim it's just an absence of a belief there are some atheists who are more than lowercase a atheists they are capital a atheists who might say I know there's no God or I believe there's no bed but that's a tiny subset and I fall into that subset if God is defined as the God of the Bible if the God of the Bible is the God we're talking about then I'm a capital a atheist I know that God doesn't exist because it can't exist in the same way that a married bachelor cannot exist it just can't it's it's a silly question but that doesn't mean any one of the other 80 billion definitions of God you know I mean we should be open we should always be open to all these possibilities so well in Pascal's wager seems a strange thing to say I I'm choosing to believe because of the consequences do you really believe then I mean yeah can you talk yourself into something because yeah because it because it's like you know you're afraid of what might happen if you don't believe or you're really not believing that I don't know yeah some people think belief is not a choice it's it's just not a choice historians would say we have an 80% probability that this is true so we're going to it's going to be our belief this is true but that's not a choice it's an 80% probability it's if it were 30% you wouldn't choose you would just admit oh the likelihood is so low so I know a lot of 82 say belief is impossible how could you believe choose to believe something when when there's a lack of evidence or no reason for that so in my first film I have a whole series I could have put in a probably fifty more but I just put in maybe twenty who all were saying I'm a hundred percent certain under percent certain a hundred percent certain and that was rather amazing yeah whereas most of us atheists and skeptics and liberals would say the likelihood is so high my confidence is 90 to 95 percent I might be wrong but I'm going to round it off so that's the kind of confidence we talk about in science and in history that were pretty comfortable in fact all truth is that way there's no 100% truth claim or 0% truth claim ever except for logically impossible married bachelors let's say but Pat with Pascal when you think about Pascal's wager it just boils down to an argument from intimidation because what if I'm wrong I'm going to hurt what if I'm wrong I'm going to burn what if there is a hell on a heaven what have you got to lose I'm going to have to I'm going to have to wager to be safe well that just boils down to a threat really with that kind of thinking you should pick the religion that has the worst hell in it because that's what you have the most to lose from Christians should become Muslims if they're going to respect that kind of reasoning because the Muslim hell is worse than the Christian hell what if the Christians are wrong and they're going to actually end up in the Muslim hell of course they don't reason like that and I don't even think Pascal was reasoning like that he was just making this bet so I I kind of think that what if you're wrong if there is a hell and I turn out to be wrong well then I'll go there I'll go there with some integrity and I think I would rather spend an eternity in Hell suffering these torment than pretending to worship this God who created a hell that would be more of a hell in my thinking to bow down like a slave before this creature that would create a torture chamber like that yeah I don't want to take too much time but I got a couple of tweets that made my heart soar I just got a tweet from Iran from Maajid who says we wish we could all be there and we wish for the day non-believers can be themselves here in Iran we're here for you just say no to religion no more myth and superstition just say no what are you gonna say just say no

Channel: Scott Burdick

Views: 83,117

Rating: 4.8300653 out of 5

Keywords: Dan Barker, Scott Burdick, Atheist, FFRF, Freedom F, Freethought

Id: -zBWShJMvbc

Length: 86min 52sec (5212 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 02 2012