David G. McAfee - "No Sacred Cows: Investigating Myths, Cults and the Supernatural"

appreciate that David a cafe will be giving a talk today he is I think obviously survived st. Patrick's Day okay I was a little worried being Irish and all I know how that works I've been over there yeah they're a happy bunch David was here in in 2015 and he is talk at that time was the importance of teaching children about religion and went over quite well and that's one of the reasons he's back again because it was a good experience he's been doing a book tour starting up north working his way down here and I think by the time he's finished there will be very few Christians left in his state yeah okay so David as do Bachelor of Arts degrees one in English and and another one in studies of Christianity with religious studies group the book C's probably so far are disproving Christianity and other secular writings that was his first one and he was just in the college town at that time going to school and he was very encouraged because it went over quite well and I think that got him on the path of going in and starting to publish some more and get his ideas expressed in a book his second book is disproving Christianity and other secular writings and that was also well received so and then he came and published another book called mom dad I'm an atheist coming out as an atheist so some people who have had trouble trying to come out and express themselves that they no longer believe what they were told when they were a kid he can help them if they read the book okay the belief book is one that we got the last time while he was here it's a book for children and explains religion and beliefs by the different religions and then we have let's see it's called the book of gods look at different guides and and I think that helps too because the kids get some idea like oh yeah you're you're a Baptist or you're or whatever whatever it gives them an idea who they're worshipping and why each one has somewhat different take on who God is and it gets people thinking and once we get people thinking hey we got him okay atheist answers rational responses to religious questions is another one and then today's talk is going to be by his book no sacred cows investigating myths costs cults and the supernatural it's one that I think you really appreciate I think it's gotten the rave reviews as a matter of fact he only came in here with two of the books he sold out up up north so but he will take orders he will be in the back also to sign the books that he has and and to take orders for any other books yes you may want to get in the city by okay let's say give it up for David McAfee [Applause] okay is this live yes yeah can you guys hear me cool all right well I think we're waiting for the presentation for a second but I do want to thank you for that lovely introduction I really appreciate it as he mentioned I've been here twice this is my second time to Tucson to this group specifically and I just want you guys to give yourselves a round of applause for such an established and involved group I'm really impressed by that so thank you [Applause] I'd also like to start out by gauging the room with a pretty simple question how many of you have heard of Maria Sybilla Marian Maria Sevilla Marian I saw one hand out there that's not all that surprising if you haven't it's okay because she was born in 1647 at a time when women were considered inferior and incapable of scientific pursuits it was believed that the rigorous life of a researcher would interfere with the domestic duties of women and I know what you're all thinking there's no way anyone today would hold that mindset this is completely outdated right no okay well someday maybe so she was a scientist at heart but she didn't have the ability to be what she wanted to be in that time she didn't have the option to become a scientist so at 13 years old she started drawing instead she started drawing insects butterflies silkworms and ultimately she became the first person to document the life cycle of a butterfly that's something that took scientific know-how more than just artistry and today her work is referenced not just by artists but by scientists and she is considered by many people to be one of the first ecologists ever the first to hold that title because she is one of the first to actually perform that scientific study to watch them so closely that she could record every single stage of their lifecycle and I see now that we finally have some pictures up here these are her actual drawings and they were just incredible but beyond being talented at art she was talented at science and that's pretty impressive she didn't have any formal scientific training but she did have curiosity and that's what really helped her along that so my point in telling you this is that we can all learn to think like scientists and we should all try to do so no matter what you have going on in your daily life she obviously couldn't be a scientist but she chose to use those skills anyway and put them to the test and I appreciate that we can all research we can all look at data and we can all draw conclusions from that data and so I feel like it's important that we do that as much as humanly possible and the fact is that we actually do use science in our daily lives whether we realize it or not any time we deduce something using evidence whether it's deciding which item to buy and and engaging the value you're you're using these skills so we've actually been using all these skills since we were babies and a lot of people don't realize that but the basic steps of the scientific method are make an observation form a hypothesis perform the experiment analyze the data report your findings and invite others to reproduce the results and as you can see here this baby is poisoning this other baby but it's in the name of science so it's okay so I feel like we should all be doing this more often I am NOT a scientist as Jerry mentioned my only degrees are in English and religious studies but I do have a few things needed to use science I have curiosity I have knowledge of the scientific method I have a passion for the truth and crucially the ability to admit when I'm wrong which is really important for this type of work so six years ago I decided to take on an important task what I deemed to be an important task using those qualities decided to look beyond the religions that I studied for years in school and investigate all myths and superstitions and false beliefs in general because I found that they are more connected than people realize there's two reasons I took on this task number one is that all false claims have the potential to cause harm that's not to say that all false claims cause harm all the time all false beliefs cause harm all the time there are certainly false beliefs that go that that are harmless but they all have the potential to cause harm because they have the potential to change how you act in your daily life based on false information some pseudo Sciences to use a recent example in the alternative healing area I discovered a group of people on Facebook of about five hundred people who use who drink and otherwise use turpentine including in enemas paint thinner to cure any disease they think that they have worms and bacteria in their body and by inserting turpentine into it they are able to cure any disease so this is obviously on the most dangerous end of the spectrum I infiltrated this group on Facebook as a believer in turpentine therapy and saw some of the most disturbing posts I've ever seen somebody saying I've been doing this for 3 3 to 4 weeks and there's red in my stool is this normal and the people commenting don't worry about it that that means it's working those are the the dying bacteria those are the dying worms that are coming out of your body and I'm like that's your intestinal lining and you're going to die see a doctor so that's on one of end of the spectrum then you have false beliefs as simple as something like a rabbit's foot a lucky rabbit's foot that doesn't always cause harm but what if one day you decide to change your course of actions based on that based on whether you had that or don't and then something bad could happen so that's that's one of the more benign instances the second reason I decided to expand and talk about all superstitions and all false beliefs really is that every study that I've seen especially in the last few years I'm sure you guys have seen these as well has shown that religion is waning religion is losing ground more and more people are identifying as nuns are identifying as no religion in particular and that's great news something to celebrate but those same studies show that belief in the supernatural is on an increase so it doesn't mean that people are being more logical and more reasonable overall it means people are rejecting more likely rigid dogmas ancient holy texts and the doctrines with which they were brought up but they're more likely to believe in ghosts in alien interactions here on earth in all sorts of unfounded conspiracy theories in psychics in any number of things the numbers are going up anything that's not linked to a ancient holy text is going down so it's kind of an interesting phenomenon and I wanted to explore that as much as possible so in my new book in those sacred cows I look into all sorts of false beliefs over the course of six years I investigated everything from 9/11 conspiracy theories to Scientology to the Westboro Baptist Church I went ghost hunting I I looked for Bigfoot I basically did everything I could and and here are a few of the specific topics that I thought I'd go over in the book when it comes to ghosts spirits inspectors like I said I did go to a haunted house which a lot of people do when they investigate ghosts but I also went beyond that to look for reasons people might see ghosts I don't find that it's helpful to tell people they didn't see something that they say they did so if they say I saw a ghost I'm not one to say you you didn't see anything but I want to try and find out what they did see or what's making them think that it's a ghost and I talked about in the book one specific example in my own life so as a skeptic as an atheist I had just graduated college put out my second book and I was just sitting up in bed resting my back the wall and I heard my door handle of my apartment start to move and obviously I was a little freaked out I was like okay somebody's trying to get into my apartment it's locked it's no big deal then the door pops open a woman floats into my room about two feet off the ground long black hair she looked exactly like you would picture a ghost looking which should have been my first clue she looked like she was from The Grudge she looked like she had been in a well for a thousand years she had blue skin that was peeling off of her face she her clothes were in tatters her white flowing clothes were in tatters she floated toward me and I was paralyzed with what I thought was fear I was so terrified of this ghost that I couldn't move a muscle and after about two or three minutes she disappeared and I was able to move again and I was so scared I ran to my computer and I googled paralyzed ghosts I don't know why that's first thing that came to my mind and I learned all about sleep paralysis and that there's a condition that about 10-15 percent of the population suffers from at some point in their life that causes waking hallucinations accompanied by paralysis it made complete sense and now every time I'm watching a ghost show of some kind I hear these stories and they're like we can't explain it we don't know what happened I was laying in bed and I was paralyzed and then and I'm like you had sleep paralysis it's it's pretty common it's a problem with the trigger between sleep and awake you're in in an in-between state and your body thinks you're asleep so you're paralyzed so that you don't fall out of a tree and our ancestors could dream and sleep and not fall out of their trees so we have that ability to be paralyzed but it crosses over into waking life and it's actually pretty terrifying if you don't know what's going on so in addition to looking into things like this I also looked into infrasound which is a source of a lot of ghosts beliefs infrasound or sounds tones that are unrecognizable to the human ear but we can feel them and they can cause what's called a feeling of presence or a feeling of dread they can cause your hair to stand on end for what seems like no reason they can cause you to get shivers up your spine for nothing just based on this presence and so a lot of haunted houses might have infrasound being created naturally through the shape of a window and the wind hitting a window at a particular angle it could happen one famous researcher I talk about in the book who kind of discovered this phenomenon discovered it because he his his office was haunted everyone who went into his office felt these feelings they saw things they don't know was going on then they replaced the air-conditioner and it was completely gone so unless air conditioners are also ghosts then I think the more likely culprit is infrasound they also have certain fungi certain mildews that can cause these loose Nations there are lots of different reasons why someone might see a ghost and I believe that that's what they saw so kind of investigated what could be the reasons for that I also talked about psychics and other so-called seers and that's a fun one because a lot of people believe in psychics and a lot of people have their personal story about this one psychic that that knew something that they couldn't have known and so I just started asking around and finding kind of the best psychics and according to the people who were read by them and then I interviewed them and I saw ace I went to a celebrity psychic who's done readings for Ellen DeGeneres and Ava Longoria and other people and I interviewed her I interviewed actually in the book three psychics and a Mentalist who is a psychic who admits that they're just doing it to mess with your mind and I really appreciated that he's actually a really cool guy and he has told me how they did everything he's like well they do this trick here's how they did it I do the same thing in my act but the difference is I tell them it's an act and I was kind of inspired and I decided to become a psychic myself this is me doing a reading in Venice Beach my name was sir o the seer and Thoreau is Horace backwards which nobody noticed it was actually a lot of fun I learned about cold and hot reading tactics and then I learned how to read people spaces and then I just went out there and I just wanted to see if I could convince anyone that I was a psychic even though I was doing these free readings it turns out I was pretty good at it 90% success rate of people who said that I said something to them that couldn't have been known without some sort of a supernatural power obviously they were wrong it actually became a problem because one one woman was so convinced that she refused to believe me when I revealed at the end that I was a skeptic and this was a social experiment she said no you just you have to say that so you won't be put away in some science lab somewhere and and I was like no really I mean you can look at my stuff but here please believe me and another woman was so convinced that she was trying to give me money and and as a part of my whole process I didn't take a cent from anyone and she was insisting and handing me money and she said I could tell she had been ripped off by so many psychics because she said oh I know you you expand it you gave so much energy to give this reading and I have to reimburse you for that energy and I'm like the spirit realm doesn't take your dollars lady and so that was really fun experiment but basically that's how I investigated the psychic realm and I talked about in the book exactly how to do it so if you want to become a psychic yourself it's really fun I wore a shirt that said I'm psychic trust me and nobody got the double meaning there either in addition to those topics I talked about alien intervention and this is a controversial one even for myself because I believe that it's statistically likely that alien life exists elsewhere possibly even intelligent alien life but I don't believe that we have enough evidence to conclude that that alien life has visited us and I make that case in the book as well as the case that it's pretty narcissistic to assume that they would want to visit us considering in the grand scheme of things we're kind of just a run-of-the-mill planet if you look into the diversity of our and think about it on that grand of a scale but we kind of want to feel important and we want to feel like somebody's watching over us if we don't have a belief in the divine belief in the alien / overlords works as well I also looked at the ancient alien hypothesis which is the belief that our ancestors were so dumb that they couldn't stack rocks properly and they needed alien help to do so and found that to be incredibly lacking in evidence definitely lots of conjecture lots of subjective interpretations of what could or could not be done by our ancestors but the fact is that our ancestors were intelligent creative people a lot like us they didn't have the same technologies but they had a lot more time on their hands and with that they could build a lot of pretty impressive stuff I also talked about in the book faith healing and alternative medicines I mentioned that a little bit earlier with the turpentine another example that I that I recently discovered at Rite Aid was Himalayan crystal pink salt inhalers and it said it's a quote substitute for your quote chemical inhalers and if you have an asthma attack you should just reach for this pink salt crystals and you'll be completely fine and that's sold it right aid a pharmacy a wellness store and it could potentially kill people so that's the type of stuff I talked about in the book but a lot of people don't realize that alternative medicine also includes stuff like exorcisms it's one of the first faith healings back in the day thousands of years ago if you had usually severe mental illness somebody would come up and hit you in the head and hit you with some endorphins and some dopamine boosts and you feel better for a few seconds a few minutes then they leave and that's considered fate that's a huge part of faith healing still today and exorcisms are actually on the rise right now the Catholic Church is reporting 300% increase in demands for exorcism is how they put it I see it as a 300% increase in demands for mental illness help that they are meeting with exorcism but I digress so those are just a few of the things that I talk about in the book I also in it in the faith-healing chapter I talk about the Church of Christ scientists have you guys heard of this that's a faith healing group that actually believes you can resurrect human beings through prayer alone and they believe that it's been done and that they have proof that it's been done so I was like okay I gotta interview these people I got to figure out what's going on so I met a woman at the Reading Room at the Church of Christ scientists and actually surrounded by books that she said were filled with evidence that this can be done that they can cure any disease including death with prayer so after our interview which is published in the book I asked to look at some of the some of the books on the shelves she said yes I opened to a random page it says Jarnell was cured by a prayer of his asthma on this date next line J Neff was cured but no other details no hospital records nothing at all and they were satisfied with that those were testimonies that meant enough to them to conclude that it was not only possible but that it happened regularly the woman said that I asked her if she had ever met anyone who had been resurrected via prayer and she her exact quote was I think my friend's sister did just I remember she died and then I saw her at the store so yeah that's what happened oh okay that's that's I guess what happened then so those are just a few of the things I talked about but the books about more than just these specific issues it's about how to drop your cognitive biases how to use the same methods that we debunked these myths with in your daily life to make good decisions all around it'sit's something that should be used throughout the day no matter what you're doing so if you want to know more you can ask me now we'll do a little QA or you could talk to me when I'm signing books in the back but thank you guys again very much for having me I really appreciate it [Applause] if you have questions please come up to the mic so everybody this is the person who narrated no sacred cows the book that I'm talking about right now thank you very much for doing that it was a great book so I mean one of the chapters that I went to first actually before I read the whole thing was chapter five what's the harm yeah and I like what you said there that anything any false belief has the potential harm even if it doesn't necessarily I belong to a couple of different groups that are sort of focused on one specific health area that has science behind it but invariably every couple of weeks every couple of months homeopathy comes up yeah and homeopathy is has been a soap box issue for me for 30 years long before I was an atheist or anything else about it and I said this is nonsense right but it comes up and and somebody will say you know use this use that and I try to inject something saying there is nothing to this that if please educate yourself on what it's actually based on and just based on what it's based on you you should be able to look at it and say obviously nothing could could work here but somebody will come in and say no there are all kinds of science behind it and they'll point to studies and I've looked a couple of these studies up one of which they always go to was like 20 years ago as a meta-analysis and the authors of the study actually came back later and said no we were wrong we got the wrong conclusion and they of course won't take that happens same with the vaccine linking autism study everybody has rejected it it's been unpublished and yet people still use it to promote their pseudoscience my question and so eventually those conversations I just kind of kind of leave them my question to you is what have you found to be the most effective way to communicate with people because if you just say if you if I describe what it's based on and I say this is not that for an example with homeopathy mhm one of the basic tenets is the more dilute the substances the more effective it will be and I will say there is nothing else in the world where this is true and and they can't come up with an example and then and yet they'll say no but it works for this so what what is your most effective way of discussing topics like that with people to have them finally turn around is is there an effective way there there is it's not something that can happen usually in a first discussion I'll give one exception in a minute homeopathy is an interesting one though because I've actually heard an example for that when when I say the more dilute the substance is the more effective it'll be there's nothing else like that I've actually heard people say vaccines are like that and they're really not but to the simple-minded person who really is trying to grasp that that straws is going to make that connection so I've actually found that to be a pretty ineffective argument because they're like we use vaccines all the time and it works like that and instead of explaining the complicated processes it's usually easier for me I talked about in the book using the Socratic method on all of these different regardless of who I'm talking to I try to be as polite as possible but I try to ask as many probing questions as possible as well that'll actually make them think because I'm not trying to really convince them in that conversation I'm really trying to plant a seed of doubt that'll get them thinking in the long run now the exception I'll talk about for homeopathy was with James Randi I don't remember if I mentioned in the book but it's one of the most inspirational moments in all of pseudoscience debunker II where James Randi is on stage and I believe there's a homeopathy proponent there with some medicine and he said to prove it wrong he's going to walk up and just take this whole bottle of sleeping medicine just took every single pill in there every sugar pill in the entire bottle and and he just gave the rest of his speech was perfectly fine sat around afterward answered questions like do you still believe that homeopathy is real because I should be dead right now if there were any medicine in that at all and so that I found that to be a very powerful message on that issue and I've seen people who believed in homeopathy see that video even and just react to it like ok well I do have some thinking to do I have some explanations to myself and that's all I can really ask of people all right so thank you I'll try to be more probing with the questions it helps a lot because getting people to think is difficult but once you do it can lead to some pretty impressive places I've seen some turnarounds that you wouldn't expect from people who send me messages after this after that you're gonna die you're gonna burn in hell and then I'm just like hey what's going on like what which one of my posts bothered you which one of my speeches bothered you let's talk about what's really going on and almost every time they apologize and sometimes I even get something more like this shows that I do have an emotional attachment to this and maybe I do need to think about why I'm so so married to this belief so that it hurts me when you tried to take it away all right cool thanks thank you very much and thanks for narrating no sacred cows hello suggestions slash question about the whole alien visitation thing I was reading about this like maybe 15 years ago and some of these people who have had these visitations I've had lesions in their parts of the brain responsible for facial recognition mm-hmm and another component was that they felt they were something was injected in their hip around there and I think well maybe maybe they're just having some really really early memories so I got in front of my mirror I had to put a small mirror by my ear and kind of leaning over trying to this kind of ruin the depth procession by my reflection in this mirror and the mirror in front of me in the bathroom I think well maybe this is a baby remembering mother kind of changing diapers and I was wondering if this is true this component of having something injected and once hip would kind of disappear with the disappearance of cloth diapers and pins mm-hmm I'm one of there's some kind of age cutoff when you have that component of interesting conviction that you were abducted by aliens yeah you know the whole big eyes and the forehead yeah it's kind of anthropometric to assume Lian's from some distant planet would look like us in any remote way and that they would work like their arms would work to like us and they'd be able to operate our doors and they'd be able to do anything they wanted really that operated with a human understanding that's entirely possible I do also want to mention sleep paralysis that I talked about before it actually has all those components as well part of sleep paralysis a lot of times not every time but people often feel like they're being poked prodded if you're super religious if you're very very Catholic for instance a lot of people who have sleep paralysis feel like it's demons who tie them down in bed that's why they're paralyzed and then pokes and prods them and that is some people interpret as a warning about hell you're gonna go to hell and we're gonna stab you with pitchforks and so not necessarily just on the hip but basically just being prodded and poked by something above you and if you are a firm believer in aliens you they see that they're being probed by aliens they see that aliens are hovering over their beds and poking and prodding them and I've heard it with angels with ghosts with demons pretty much whatever your cultural belief system is it comes out when you're having these hallucinations / dreams that are just extremely memorable and a little bit different than dreams you might expect so while that's definitely possible I think I would say almost I would say the majority more than 50% of alien and ghost stories that I hear where they start out so I was in bed I'm just like all right stop if you're in bed probably sleep paralysis but yeah there are so many different ways that that these types of things could manifest that it's almost impossible to conclude that these alien life forms that we've never proven exist are the culprit when it's more likely we find something locally that we do know exists thank you anyone else yep I didn't believe in psychics until my daughter was really ill and I called a psychic I was in Tucson I believe the psychic was in California we had never met mm-hmm and her first question was I see a little blonde girl in pain and that was my daughter we thought she had MS and I said to the psychic we think she has MS she said when was she born I thought she may have asked me her name and she said no she does not have MS she has something pinched in her neck six months later the doctors found out she had spinal stenosis I've had two interactions with this psychic who happens to now living in Tucson and I have met her but I can't explain it yeah they're there like I said in a psychic section a lot of people have these like very very similar stories I do want to point out that when I was doing my psychic bent on Venice Beach I said something very similar to a woman and got a hit off of it as well I said I'm seeing a small blonde girl and she's in pain that's actually it's actually pretty common to use these types of vague suggestions to get started because everybody everybody in this room has known a small blonde girl who's been in pain at some point and the woman said oh my god my grandma when she was very very young had had I forgot what it was some some extremely crippling disease when she was younger and that's something that I think about a lot something that I don't want in my bloodline and so then I jumped to okay so something tells me that you're also planning on having children and that this is a concern for you oh my god of course but she just told me that she was concerned about her bloodline she just we give away a lot of more a lot more information than we think we do this is all just from a cold reading and after that she was so impressed that she wanted to come back and she wanted to keep coming and I had to tell her that I was a skeptic and that this is all part of a social experiment but this is all through cold reading there's also the process of warm reading even hot readings where psychics will actually say you call them on phone they don't answer the first time they look up your number they get your name they go to social media they know almost everything about you they call you back okay so let's talk about this talk about that I can't rule I can't tell you exactly how the specific story happened but I can tell you that no psychic has ever proven their powers from a scientific perspective and so if they are if they have these powers they're hiding them from any way to prove it which would help humanity which would do a lot to help fellow man so it's kind of a selfish thing to do and from the selfish perspective it would get them a lot of money to do it so there are a lot of reasons to prove this type of thing and it's never been proved in a scientific setting okay I think thank you very much I wondered if T's sleep paralysis but phenomenon was a lot like the end of int or near-death experiences I was resuscitated three times one night and twice I went through seeing this big light field getting the Atheist son of a Baptist deacon I didn't see anything other than something that looked like sort of candles mushroom soup okay something but a lot of than that well that's probably just synapses exactly unclicking in my mind now there's a lot of people that are religious report having seen all these they see Jesus they see all these things well I'm sure that's things they were raised with exactly everyday and as their synapses disconnect and so forth now is that similar to sleep paralysis I would say in a lot of ways it's similar because it feels so real just like near-death experiences do and I do have a chapter on near-death experience as well as well in the book and you are actually right on it is a cultural phenomenon you see what you have been raised with what you're familiar with what you've seen in movies people who are extremely religious see heaven or hell actually I've met atheists who saw heaven or hell because they were raised in a Christian family and that's something that their brains still expected to see but it's more of a coping mechanism than anything else with death when we're in that state our brain is flooded with certain chemicals and in the book I talk about how scientists disagree on exactly which ones and which mixtures and how but the point is that our brain is trying to prevent itself from having to deal with this catastrophic trauma of death so it floods good feelings and those good feelings are often interpreted as Jesus as something as a bright light but I think that the book pretty much disproves near-death experiences as an objective Devine phenomenon because I talked about studies from other countries where they look into near-death experiences of people in India and guess what they don't see when they have near-death experiences and in Jesus and God they see their deities they see things that are familiar to them in their culture and to me when I realized that I was like okay well nobody can really argue I mean it's something that our brain makes up to make things easier and in our cultures that typically is religion so it's an interesting that you didn't actually see any religious figures because you must be that much of a non-believer that you're just like no yeah I'd really put that yeah and you're segment about ghosts you had grief up there but you didn't talk about that so I'd actually love to talk about that so I would say I think the statistic it's in the book but I think it's about 30% of people at some point in their life will experience what's called a grief hallucination this is when somebody you love or somebody very close to you passes away usually and you see remnants of them or you feel or you hear remnants of them oftentimes if it's somebody who used to walk up behind you and put their hand on your shoulder you'll feel their hand on your shoulder and to a lot of people that's proof that they're a guardian angel that they're nearby but this is a well-studied phenomenon and it's called a grief loose nation some people will see the face of someone they know or love in a crowd of people some people will have full-on conversations with this hallucination and again this is a coping mechanism for our brain this is something that makes life easier because we just lost somebody that we care about somebody that probably meant a lot to us and so to have that last little goodbye that a lot of us miss is helpful in in our mental health and so evolutionarily speaking it actually makes a lot of sense that grief loose Nations exist and why they exist and so just talking to people about it I think helps spread awareness because I know a lot of people who have said yeah yeah I believe I don't believe in all that stuff but I saw a ghost of my dead friend once and I tell them about grief loose nations and a lot of time that helps them understand helps them put what they saw into context because it can be a confusing one so thank you for that question I forgot to mention that yes sir I think it's it's possible at least and and you certainly need to be prepared to argue to respond to the argument that grief hallucination or sleep paralysis are just names for an unexplained phenomenon so what you would need to do then is to get into the physical mechanisms yet believe there are physical mechanisms for these things and I know you mentioned earlier well it's a confusion between the sleep on Salib off switch it's just naming still until you get to an actual mechanism because you're trying to work in a materialist today in here mm-hmm that's what you're discounting is all the non materialistic responses to these things so you need to be able to describe the mechanism otherwise all you've really done is rename it yeah I've had a lot of people say that before they're like yeah I've heard of sleep paralysis but that's just the word for aliens visiting me but then other people think sleep paralysis is the word for god visiting them or for demons or for Jesus or for just about anything so it makes sense again if you look at it from a cultural perspective these are things that they expect to see as opposed to things that are objectively true it's not likely that aliens gods Jesus all use the same mechanism to invade our sleep time it's more likely and and explained by evolution and by scientists now because sleep paralysis specifically is very well explained and it just makes more sense to believe that that's the case but I have I have heard that exact well that's just a word for this and I feel like that's a pretty shallow response because you're kind of ignoring all the science at that point and that actually points to these mechanisms and when you do that you kind of you lose a lot there I think but yeah I've responded to that before and I think it's an interesting an interesting argument but in the grand scheme of things that really falls flat when you realize how many different types of hallucinations happen during this process of sleep paralysis I've actually had sleep paralysis where it was nothing supernatural at all I was in bed and six people broke into my house I thought they started ransacking my house and taking stuff from drawers and I thought that I was paralyzed by fear I was like getting up to fight them but I couldn't and this is just because it's again we know evolutionarily why our bodies stay immobilized during sleep so that our ancestors didn't fall from the trees we have this mechanism that exists and sometimes it malfunctions and so that's a big part of it as well I'm a spiritual person I'm a professed Christian not to take away from the Hindu in India I in this body we've talked a lot about I believe helped me in my unbelief as a proof for going into more of the secular line of thought I at that time argued that that's not the case but anyway my point is it seems to precipitate a lot of these why so many people believe in God there's a number 37 that says no one has ever disproved the existence of my god and that seems to be a true statement and a lot of these other things precipitate that can be then it's can be a good thing were there Christian wars were there wrong things that are there wrong things that happen because of religion of course but but nobody has disproved right any particular God that's that no no one has ever disproved the existence of a god yeah that's very true no one has disproved the existence of a celestial teapot nobody has disproved the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster I mean that this argument has taken many many incarnations and the disproof of something requiring the dish using not being disproved as the only reason to believe something never made sense to me but I have heard that many many times but I put I say in the book that when you don't have a reason to when you don't have dis proof but you don't have proof why would your natural inclination be to believe in it you know it mine would be to regard it with skepticism until that proof comes but again that's the scientific skeptic mindset and that's not what everybody shares a lot of people need that belief a lot of people have an ingrained belief in their genetics it's something that evolutionarily speaking belief and religion has helped us a lot through society and your groups like this usually hate when I say that but it's true religions helped bind tribes together early on and that helped people build communities it helped people be familiar with each other and understand each other and trust each other and watch out for each other and then what happens when you bind a bunch of groups together in these different religions when they actually clash it creates tension and problems and so there's the good and the bad but that's something that also needs to be acknowledged thank you you can't prove there there isn't a God but you can't prove there is a God either exactly so that's why all of us should be agnostics yep because we cannot prove there is or isn't a god yep I say in the book that I'm an agnostic atheist and when people ask me what that means it means I don't believe and I don't know as both and and that boat I feel like that describes me pretty well I don't know for sure which is actually why I don't believe because I'm not going to believe in something that I'm not confident about I always wanted to know your thoughts on the the reasons behind the extent to which one culture or country is more predominantly religious than another country or culture and it you know the United States if I recall is generally speaking more religiously active than a lot of particularly European countries and I you know I guess to this point in my life I've sort of just assumed that that was probably a result of just basic fundamental education personally I wasn't ever taught until after I was actually out of school learned on my own much about the basic tenants of evolution geology genetics and things like that and are we still letting kids down like that or not definite and then second question is the United States has a tremendous diversity within that religious belief system like there's so many different types of religions and is that a similar event in other countries as well that diversity yes to answer your questions in order the reasons that different countries have the different varying levels of belief are twofold number one is culture Americans early on put a lot of their culture a lot of their eggs in the religion basket as opposed to focusing on other aspects of their culture other religions especially in your other regions especially in Europe they tend to leave religion to be a personal matter they don't put it as much in the public square and that's more a matter of culture than a lot of things but you actually touched on a really important point which is the second point and it's what I discussed when I was here three years ago the importance of teaching religion to children because in most places in Europe they teach religious literacy at a very young age you start in school and you learn about math and science and geography and religion and you learn about how different people believe how much they believe things that they've done in the past and what that does is it gives young people a perspective that they don't have a lot of the times in the u.s. that's actually partially because of our separation of church and state now separation of church and state doesn't mean you can't teach religion in school from an objective academic perspective but a lot of people take it to mean that they think that you can't mention religion in school so they took religion completely out of schools to the point that they leave it to the personal life they leave it to the family to the parents and then what happens you grow up your whole life only familiar with your religion with whatever religion you grew up with whether it's a branch of Christianity or anything else and they end up not having that wider perspective not knowing that in many cases that other religions exist and then they fight they fight the teaching of things like evolution in schools to make it put it off even further some people are 18 before they learn what evolution really is it's something that definitely needs to be addressed in our schools and it's something that I've been fighting for for a long time to get better education especially when it comes to religion so that people can see that their parents religion isn't superior it isn't some special religion that is true and everything else is wrong it helps to know that other people have these equal equally important beliefs that are that they're just as fervent about as far as the multiculturalism and the multi religions of the United States it's obviously still very heavily Christian I mean even most of the denominations are count as their own little religions like Mormonism as a denomination of Christianity jovis Witnesses are Christians as well so definitely the vast majority is Christians but we do tend to have a lot more diversity in general than a lot of countries and when that happens you have other beliefs mixed in you have that melting pot effect and just like in history when you in when I majored in religious studies a lot of stuff I learned about was trade routes I know it's weird but when you have one country trading with this country here you can actually look on a time scale and see where they picked up beliefs from this country because they were visiting so often they told stories then they came back they added a new God to their Pantheon because this was a God that they had over there it's pretty fascinating and the same thing happens in the u.s. today where new religions are founded based on these similarities and and combinations and what you see now a lot of times with people who say they're Buddhist for instance in the United States they're practicing something that usually isn't very related to the original Buddhism we kind of created our own Western Buddhism here and so it's definitely fascinating to see how those religions evolved and in places with more diversity you're gonna have more of that thank you thank you for your presentation I wanted to get your idea on some observations that I have been making over the years well a number of us have wondered why does it appear to be such a difficult issue for a believer to do some of the things you've been talking about be a more critical thinker and then act on the conclusions your critical thinking leads you to we have or I guess I will own this it seems to me that there are three great fears that people have and I'm curious as to whether you run across these or have others the first one is to simply admit that we have been wrong yep that's the biggest one the second one is recognizing that if we act on what we discover that we may lose our support group we may lose our family definitely may lose our income and then the third one is the big one to punch with religions that we may spend eternity in a horrible place yeah so those are the three bigs that I see do you see anything different not only do I agree with those but I agree with the order in which you said them because admitting we're wrong for anybody is a difficult concept and it's why I talk about it a lot in no sacred cows I actually lifts times and talk about times in recent years when I've been proven wrong about stuff that I was extremely confident about because I feel like it's important to recognize that we can all do that that we can all admit we're wrong and move on and the reasons why we can't do that are actually extremely complicated but there's this book called mistakes were made in parentheses but not by me and I highly recommend this book it teaches you all about self justification about cognitive dissonance about why it's so difficult for us to admit that we're wrong it destroys our self perception is the general consensus it's something that we spend our whole lives thinking okay we're person I'm pretty smart I think so to admit that we wrong about something especially something we based our whole life on especially something that our parents are trusted loved ones told us when we're very young it can be life shattering it's it's like admitting everything you've ever known is wrong and it's something that takes more than just some some clever quips it takes a lot of time a lot of thinking and that's that's what a lot of people try to avoid when it comes to your second point to community I think that's a huge part of it as well and I actually write in one of the books I have back there mom dad I'm an atheist the guide to coming out as a non-believer I write about establishing a new sense of community and how it's important for people who finally do become secular or leave their religion to find something to replace that a lot of people their religion is everything they go to school with the same religious people they go to the same church their whole town or community in a lot of cases is filled with religion and so to replace all of that in one fell swoop is very difficult especially in religions where you're blacklisted or or otherwise cut off from your people the people that you've known your whole life so establishing a new sense of community is extremely important and that's why I see the value in groups like this because people who might not have their church anymore can come here meet friends talk have food do volunteer activities and get that same basic structure and that same societal need of having these people around without having the nonsense behind it so very good points I like those a lot thank you thanks for your presentation um this is a great forum so I just had more of a comment really so I went to Europe a couple of years ago for the first time and what I found was really interesting I was in Ireland and I met this person and he he told me he was a devout atheist and so I was surprised I thought an atheist in Ireland this is very strange and one of the things he pointed out to me which I had never thought of though I've lived here all my life he said what country what other country in the world puts on their money in god we trust' because you know those two concepts that you talked about separation of church and state however you know we have that on our money yep you know i have in my wallet right now a 20 pound note and from britain and it has the queen you know who's the head of state and also on the back it has a little blurb about commerce because that's what money is about about commerce crazy right and so i don't think those things - things are separated oh they're not ya know the separation of church and state is a huge problem in the united states the way that it's separated because it's really not and as you might know that wasn't something that was founded our money didn't start off with In God We Trust on it that was something that was added on paper money not too that not too long ago and that's something to to combat the Red Scare to come back communism to galvanize people again this is a tribal thing it brings people together against the out-group against even a non-existent out group or even a an out group that isn't really a threat it brings people together and that was the original point of that and today they argue that it's not a federal endorsement of religion because it's the federal endorsement of a god it could be any God and so therefore to them to the Supreme Court at least it's not considered against the Establishment Clause I disagree with that however I've also noticed in certain places like in Canada they don't have in their constitution a separation of church and state like we have yet in practice they have a much more separated Church of state it's a lot it has a lot to do with the culture it's more like I said before about it being a personal belief to those people as opposed to something that they have to legislate and force other people into it's kind of a uniquely American mindset really I also want to note that I saw I don't remember where it was but I have a foreign note from somewhere with Charles Darwin on and I just thought that was amazing that was yeah that was a taboo topic yeah thank you for your presentation on a lighter note I have a relative I wouldn't see if it's he or she or which side of the family is it's on I'll guess who has a who has a way of she apparently she she she went through this process that was very successful and she seems to claim that it works over and over again and the process is when a full moon comes already funny well let me tell you before I did this I I bought a lottery ticket and she said go out under the full moon hold open your wallet and say fill er up fill er up fill er up we actually did that do you have any other ways you know of to win the lottery well actually there's a there's one guy who has won the lottery I think eight to ten times and his secret is not magic or psychics or anything it's science and math figuring out when the best times to buy where the best locations to buy and he actually wrote a book on it so you could probably win the lottery if you're good enough at it our people motivated to keep their religion because they want to go to heaven and eternally he have a pleasant place or that they would burn in hell which which one turns in 100 it's the carrot and the stick approach for sure you have both of those and there are people who are differently motivated not all of us work the same way so religions usually have a way to punish and reward to kind of capture all those different types of people it's very very interesting when you look at like the advent of these fire and brimstone preachers that didn't always exist normally in history they usually focused on the heaven the usually focused on happiness but in the United States they kind of turned toward this fire-and-brimstone which works on some people you got to scare him into the pews you know otherwise your religions gonna lose its lose its power if fewer and fewer people are coming to church and so they just started saying well if you don't hear it come here you're gonna die and be tortured for eternity so I'll see you on Sunday so it definitely works for different people I never found either of those approaches persuasive for myself especially because if I'm imagining myself in heaven I definitely know people who I love and care about who would be in Hell and that would make it my personal hell knowing that they're being tortured for eternity just for believing differently than me and I know a lot of people who share that feeling if they have a husband or a wife for instance that believes differently from them how do you justify that when are you gonna when you do go to heaven how is that going to work out and the traditional Christian answer has been oh don't worry he'll God will wipe your memory you won't even know that person existed Oh even better the serene like get a get a brain wash some people don't want their relatives to be there with them yeah yeah thank good riddance no I also wanted to mention James Randi has a million dollars set aside yes the psychics or anybody that can do it under controlled conditions and prove that they really are psychic yep and it's gone unclaimed now for what 20-some years yep I write about that in the book as well as well and including some of there's actually a couple of those some are $100,000 some are a million dollars but they set up these objective criteria by which you could prove a supernatural power if you actually had one and I encourage people who say that they know psychics for instance who this person is definitely a psychic okay go here get a million dollars win a Nobel Prize change not just the history of the world but change how we look at medicine using psychic powers we could learn more than just what's wrong in my particular family we can look at what's wrong in society we could solve global issues we could solve world hunger but you do a lot of things and it seems like people are either hesitant or they take the tests and fail and one of my one of my favorite instances of that was uri geller who could obviously very clearly you could move things with his mind he's telekinetic so he put a pen down and move it with his mind and all James Randi had to do was walk up and sprinkle some sawdust in front of him and say okay now do it because he knew he was blowing on it very subtly and moving it with his breath and all of a sudden Uri Geller said oh my powers are blocked I can't do it so apparently sawdust cures telekinesis so now we know that yeah thank you I was wondering if you had a recommendation specifically for books on how to teach yourself to be a psychic and the reason for that is I think it's very hard to disprove something like James Randi is not the most personable guy yeah and so he just pisses people off and it's far easier if you can do something where you can actually like say well you know not only can James Reddy disprove Uri Geller but you can too you can also be a psychic yeah so that's one question is do you seriously have the names of books that you can teach yourself the other question is I'm just wondering what you see spectrum wise in terms of belief in the supernatural between age groups because we're obviously a much older age group and what do you see among people your own age that makes them tend to believe or not believe okay so the first question I'd like maybe if you come up to the table when I'm done and I'll give you my email because I have like 50 books on how to be a psychic I also took an online course that was free that I could point you to it was very very fascinating I also read a lot of books by psychics which really helped me get into their mind even if they weren't trying to teach me how to do what they do I was getting a feel for it by reading their books I forgot the second question now oh the age-groups surprisingly not that much of a difference depending on the groups that I've talked to I've seen age groups very young when I speak to college campuses I've seen older age groups and it seems like there is a pretty consistent percentage of people who believe in something who believe in something supernatural and that thing that they believe that supernatural tends to vary by age so my little sister is 18 years old she is a flat earther she believes that the earth is flat I have not been able to talk her out of it yet but I just found out a couple weeks ago I gave her my book and she's going to be reading it so that should be fun that tends to be more popular with the younger crowd also Flat Earth just a historical note has never been very popular belief Columbus contrary to popular belief did understand that the word world was spherical ancient Romans understood that the world was fearful based on measurements of shadows and people today more people per capita today believe in a flat earth than any time in our history it's really mind-blowing it's because of celebrity culture it's because these people who are speaking out about these issues are extremely ill informed about science but extremely famous and people look up to them it's a problem with social media and with celebrity culture so those beliefs that are popular among those people to anti-vaxxers well that's another one that's celebrity brought on a lot by celebrities and linked to the younger crowd a lot more and then when I when I address different groups like groups like this one and related groups I might get more of this vague sense of spirituality or more a belief in a passive belief in an afterlife of some kind or belief in ghosts or a belief in a psychic because they had this experience usually when they're younger so yeah the belief itself the the type of belief changes but the belief itself really stays the same it's kind of interesting hi having been raised by a family and society that's predominantly Mennonite we all so Anabaptist group we had other Anabaptist groups and one of them was one that I mentioned in early session this morning the German Baptist this is to lead into a joke and it has to do with being in heaven and and they this the joke goes that people a group of people went to heaven and they were getting a you know the tour by somebody maybe Peter or Saint Peter or somebody and there was this one room that was closed off to everybody else and they said well what's behind that door and they said well that's the German Baptists in there they think they're the only ones that are here number two were you raised religious and come out of religion and if anything you want to say about that appreciate thank you thank you very much first of all I like that joke especially because it can be applied to so many different types of movement can make the same joke of Mormons or infant health I actually was raised in a Christian family both my parents are Christians or were Christians at the time my mom is now an atheist and a free thinker and a humanist thanks in large part to my speeches and my books and stuff like that so she's amazing she's a former drove us witness it takes a lot of work to leave that cult so very proud of her my dad just left the Mormon Church three months ago very complicated family dynamics my grandparents with whom I lived as a child were both fundamentalist Christians who believed in a young earth the earth is only six thousand years old it was created in six days women shouldn't speak in church whatever it says in the Bible is true I even convinced my grandma that some things were true because I said that they were in the Bible and if it's in there I believe it and I'm like okay well you just said something that's completely not in there so that's that's kind of where I'm coming from but I personally was never a believer I can't remember a time when I believed in any God or any religion and a lot of people asked me and they're like oh so you were probably just so smart that you you knew that it was all when you were very young and I'm no I was actually so stupid that I didn't know people took it serious leave that people I thought I loved Church it was one of my favorite activities as a kid I would go I would sing the songs I'd get candy I would learn these cool stories I'd learn about Joseph and his coat of many colors I was like these are awesome tales I get the ethical values I understand all this and then one day I told my grandma I didn't want to go to church and she said oh well you're gonna go to hell and I was like wait you believe that I was like you believe that God drowned everyone on earth except for one family and a boat oh yes I'm like oh I've been I've been looking at this is entirely wrong my whole life so that was about 13 when I realized people actually believed in religions I thought the whole time that they were just like stories and so I started instead of being scared away from the church like a lot of people would have been I kind of started going more and more often because I was just so curious about how people can believe these things and also how other people can believe different crazy things that are just equally you know they believe them just as much as my family believe this but they're completely different they can't interact completely contradictory so I started going to churches and temples and going to everything I could and then when I was 18 and I went away to college I decided to major in religious studies to learn even more about that and so people weren't really surprised when I told them that was my major they were like oh that makes sense thank you I was just wondering your thoughts I'm kind of maybe like poking fun and lampooning kind of friends you might have real-life or Facebook you know not I want to say this you know specifically not with malicious intent anything like that but equating their religious beliefs to Bigfoot or fly to earth you know UFOs how far do you take you know how much do you poke fun at that kind of stuff yeah um well I guess I'm a little ignorant here because I don't see that as poking fun but I do compare them all the time because they're very comparable supernatural beliefs in general and and that isn't necessarily including Bigfoot although there are people who think that Bigfoot is an interdimensional being which is why we don't have any bodies or any fecal matter or anything like that he only appears at certain times and that disappears into another dimension so these things are intrinsically linked and so I bring it up a lot and people do see it as an attack and and it's unfortunate because I'm never trying to attack anyone I might make light jokes Iban I was banned from Facebook for 30 days for posting a picture of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Bill Gates says I believe in vaccines and medicines and and hospitals and Steve Jobs says I believe in homeopathy and crystals and something else and then they said okay well let's see who lives longer and it isn't bad taste is in bad taste but it's also true and Steve Jobs did deny Western medicine in his treatments in his treatments of one of the most aggressive types of cancer of all time two in favor of something like homeopathy in favor of crystals and so this is something that really causes problems it could have I don't know that it would have saved his life but it could have given him more time it could have saved his life if he had used more traditional medicine and so the jokes that I make I try to make sure that they have a real point that people can get and understand and but I do find that even when I'm just comparing things and not making jokes people do get offended and and that's part of the process because it's cognitive dissonance they're upset that their beliefs are being challenged more than they're upset about my joke thanks a lot for coming today I enjoyed that thing just as an aside to you do you know what Steve Jobs last words were I do not according to his sister the last things he said as he was passing on was oh wow oh wow oh wow oh wow my guess is that that was a near-death experience maybe yes sir I find it interesting that the Pew reports here a few years ago found that more than 50% of the Christians do now no longer believe in hell so they are committee completely divided amongst themselves yep as to where whether these even hell or not let alone figuring out where it's at which is why he's been my question if there's a heaven where is it at yeah normally Mormons believe it's right up there on a planet well and we had some people that committed suicide about 40 30 40 years ago that they were going to go in a comet and ride that to heaven yeah you name it there's been all kinds of ways of trying to find heaven and and it always hurts me they point up and say heaven above well that space we're honest fair so I go I go okay what part of it is it's heaven at because space is is a 2.1 degrees absolute is that the kind of a temperature you want to live in in heaven you know and and that's empirical yeah that's that's not guessing so I have to question anybody who says there's a heaven because the original heaven was below a flat earth and that's the reason people when I was young which I haven't been to church in years may what minister always tells you to bow your heads which means you're going to face down towards heaven below the earth and that's a clear and not only that all of your ancient references to the Sun were to it being put away in heaven at night below earth the Flat Earth if you go around to the other side of this round earth today you'll find this down there in heaven on the other side of where you were till you you name it that's that I could just go on with this yeah there are 41,000 denominations of Christianity so they like you said they don't agree on heaven they don't agree on hell they don't agree a bit about basically anything but I imagine the response by a modern a Christian Church today would say that your church was run by the devil and that's why he wanted you to believe that the heaven was below that's also why sunday is the most divided day of the nation of the of the week yep there you go my other point is we scientists write up equations hypotheses to try to prove something true or false and there has never been a hypothesis written on religion so how can they possibly say that it has to be true when they can't even write a hypothesis so we can do something about it that that becomes a ridiculous statement to even say it's true when you can't write something to prove your your own hypothesis H you don't have one because you've never written one exactly yeah it's kind of the antithesis of science it's it's a completely faith based I believe this because this book tells me to as opposed to I believe this based on empirical evidence it's really crazy to see the difference in mindsets but but that's what we're trying to fix I know they also have a religious joke okay and then you want to end it there now go sign books okay maybe it's just Isis guy got bombed and he's all burning and fighting on fire and he comes up the pearly gates and and st. Peter I said well there there's a Muslim I'd better send out an imam to meet him and the guy comes up there and the mom goes out meet him and and says welcome to heaven and and he says yeah I'm here to get my 86 virgins and he says oh I think there was a slight mistaken in that reading it's an 86 year old nun oh good thank you guys very much I really appreciate it give him a big hand here okay [Applause] you go to lunch we actually have to go right to Sierra some of us will go to lunch at 2500 C at the cafeteria he's going to give a talk down at Sierra Vista after this so he's still on his book tour so I think we had a good good meeting and I hope everybody enjoyed it okay thanks for coming

Channel: Freethought Arizona

Views: 2,070

Rating: 4.4029851 out of 5

Keywords: Skepticism, myths, cults, supernatural, ghosts

Id: pF7E4Ek7czg

Length: 78min 41sec (4721 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 11 2020