Leaving Christianity Dan Barker Skepticon 2 Redux

our next speaker kind of makes my job up here as an introduction as an introductory agent kind of superfluous because I'm pretty sure everybody knows exactly who he is and everything he's done but I'm still obligated to read about him Dan Barker served as a Christian preacher musician for 19 years before discarding his faith in becoming one of the nation's most prominent atheists Dan was PR director for the Freedom From Religion Foundation from 87 204 and was elected co-president of the foundation with Annie Laurie Gaylor in 2004 he's a contributing editor to the free thought today and is involved in the foundation state and church lawsuits he's the author of godless how an evangelical preacher became one of America's leading atheists and now president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation join me in giving a very rabble-rousing piratey welcome to Dan Barker well hello all you godless heathens and happy heretics that's that's how Annie Laurie likes to start each of our free thought radio show do some of you listen to free thought radio podcast and online on air America and it's a blast because not only do we get to interview all these great people and some of you whom we've interviewed or hear in this audience but we get to I have to read all their books in order to do this interview so what a great job to get paid for reading all these great books but if you want to help our show I've run out of jokes I have I have about fifty really good like free thought religion jokes but we're on show number 185 now so I keep asking people send jokes and so I can use them and one of the most recent ones was Jesus went into a hotel and put three nails on the desk and said could you put me up for the night I didn't I didn't write that one but somebody some student did this is this is a seven or eight day tour for me last Saturday I landed in San Antonio Texas and rented a car and this is event number 10 since last Saturday saturday was the fact free thinkers of Central Texas about 250 people it was a lot of fun and Vicks stinger was there are you hearing Vic somewhere he's hiding out there yeah and others and it was pretty amazing they thought about a hundred and fifty would be there they had to bring in extra chairs the next day in San Marcos at Texas State two events including a debate on can you be good without God with a local Reverend preacher type guy who basically informed us that there really are not very many true Christians in the world don't blame don't blame Christianity for Hitler because you know Hitler wasn't a true Christian and then I said well then Stalin wasn't a true atheist right if you can play that game you know anybody who's not and so I saw I asked him well who's the true Christian it was Martin Luther a Christian and he said no I'd never heard anyone say that well I said was John Calvin a Christian and he said no so apparently the only true Christians are him and his family and his six people in his church I suppose but that was a fun debate I was in Austin on Monday and then in up in Denton in Arlington and Plano Texas on Thursday Thursday morning Plano Texas to debate dinesh d'souza and as the huge prestonwood Academy prestonwood Baptist Church Southern Baptist Church and it was like Carnegie Hall this big auditorium with multiple cameras and big screens and I mean they must have millions of dollars and what do you call those cameras that go up and they move around in the air that kind of thing even you know they did and they had a full restaurant down in the basement and a Starbucks and you know just to shoot like a city and that there Academy of high schoolers and college students were there for this debate and they had the big great god debate and it was webcast to like 20 other campuses around the state so it was a big fancy deal and I was fortunate that I saw Vik stinger in the in San Antonio because like I bought another copy of his book the New Atheism and he's got some quotes in here that totally demolished dinesh d'souza and I read some of them and Dinesh had really little to say about it which was kind of nice I [Applause] also when it came up to the resurrection I got to talk a little bit about Bob price are you still here Robert somewhere so your name came up as well and about a month ago I debated paganism and Christianity and then Richard carrier I used his name a lot or were you Richard you said Oh down here there you are good to see you we keep seeing each other at these places here and there and we did a debate together a team debate once against a Muslim in where was that Dearborn Michigan yeah that's a good Islamic community there but I was able to play Dinesh against that audience this is a Southern Baptist Church right Dinesh is a Catholic Pro Evolution in fact I held up Dinesh his book and I said - you've got some wonderful things in this book I really love that section where you defend evolution I thought it was amazing how he in three succinctness and you're so you're so charitable yeah even though you disagree with Richard Dawkins on the god question you really admire Dawkins when he sticks to biology and Dinesh is going like this and the audience is going like this and it was it was a lot of fun and we had a big you know back he's a good showman actually he's that he's a good public speaker and he knows how to talk succinct so we had one of these kind of great sporting event kind of debates which i think is gonna be online pretty soon they'd webcast and they say that you can watch the thing online and then what was that Thursday Thursday night in Oklahoma City and then last night again in Oklahoma City it at Oklahoma University so it's been a fun time and then tomorrow going home and then I have another debate Thursday night in London on is God a delusion with a Muslim it would be the third Muslim debate a guy named Adam Dean who's an up-and-coming Islamic apologist or whatever who's gonna argue not that God is not a delusion and two more debates one on morality without God and another one on is the only stable government a theocratic government in an Islamic guy's gonna argue that's the only way you can have a stable world is that the government is run by theocracy so if you have any jokes keep them coming I do a lot of debates and I did one well I did seven debates with this one guy his name was John Rankin and I've stopped I stopped because at the final debate he got up and he said Dan is demon-possessed and I thought well I thought we were having this civil thing and if he really thinks I'm demon-possessed what's the point but we did three nights in a row on the contradictions of the Bible is the Bible reliable and he set it up he said we're gonna do three nights in a row and three different churches in Connecticut and so he said Dan I want you to bring your best strongest Bible contradictions and then I will respond to every single one of them right and so I did I prepared like ten for the first night but then I knew that he would come back the next night with an answer so I prepared 10 different ones for the next night for the next church and then so I had like 30 different different examples of Bible contradictions and to his credit on almost all of them he was able to come back with something he hadn't done any homework he didn't know what I was gonna erase he wanted to just show everybody they're not that hard to dismiss you know and he he came up you could come up any of you out in this audience could come up with some kind of an answer to a contradiction especially the ones that have to deal with theology or you know with maybe a historical question they can always say you're taking it out of context or you're not understanding the true meaning of the original words or yes it does say this here but over here it says this which mitigates that you know that you can always think of something to kind of make a contradiction that has a lot of words in it you kind of go away right but I was surprised and I guess I shouldn't have been because I used to be a fundamentalist I was surprised that the contradictions that really bother him the most to which he had no hands where the things that what you and I might think are insignificant they had to do with the numbers the things that really got under his skin had to do with contradictory numbers in the Bible and he scratched his head he in fact I'll tell you a couple of them here he scratched his head and he said you know you got something there there son you know I don't know I'll get back to you on that he said of course he's never got back to me but the simple ones like um how many stalls did Solomon have in first Kings 426 Solomon had 40,000 stalls for chariot horses and 12,000 horses but in second chronicles 925 Solomon had 4,000 stalls for horses and chariots well we can see that that's probably a scrabbled mistake four thousand or 40,000 big deal right I mean somebody made a mistake but if you're fundamentalist Christian the Bible has no mistakes it can't have any errors like that and when I was a preacher and even Hector Avalos says that he thinks one of the most effective ways to prove error in the Bible just to prove it is to use these numbers things and because the Bible to the fundamentalist is completely in error there's no mistakes in it at all I know not all Christians are like that I know that there's moderates and there's liberals who have a totally different idea and it doesn't bother them you know most Catholics aren't bothered by what the Bible says or doesn't say it's just that narrow branch of fundamentalist like me like Richard Dawkins says in the foreword to my book godless Dan wasn't just a preacher he was the kind of preacher you would not want to sit next to on a bus I was that guy I was that guy on campus or wherever and you've seen that guy haven't you who has these answers I just knew that you you were secretly starving and you didn't know it until you met someone like me it was your lucky day when God directed you to sit next to me on a bus because it's not by accident and after a while I would look at you and say excuse me for saying this but I can see you having some real troubles in your life now aren't you how does he know you're struggling you're having a problem with the personal relationship in your life right now aren't you yeah well you know I used to feel that way and there's like what's the meaning of life and what's it all about and you don't know and you know there's an answer it's so easy it's so crass you know to do that it's just so obvious but you know what it works if you want to be an evangelist if you want to be a missionary just do it it actually works just say those stupid things and there's a lot of people who think this must be from God I better listen to this and then it strikes some kind of a chord otherwise how do you explain conversion how do you explain the Mormons going over to England and going up to people in the street and telling them this story the Hill Cumorah and the angel Moroni and by the way do you know there's an island kimura Island with the capital of it is moron I do you know that Joseph Smith knew that but how do you explain that they went up to these people and just said these weird things and then the people went okay and then they went to Utah with him they moved you know we laugh but it works it's been working for forever for centuries for millennia this is working this conversion thing and so I was one of those guys who you know the Bible is absolute Word of God and before I left I grabbed my Bible I used to preach with this Bible this is one of the two Bibles they used to preach with just so that it could get the exact authentic this is the authentic version from the King James so we know it's truth but for the fundamentalist Christian and that's not every Christian the actual inner see the Bible is the most important thing if the Bible has mistakes in it then it falls so if you're dealing with one of those kind of Christians you can start off by just bringing some of these obvious numerical mistakes for example second Kings 826 versus second chronicles 22 to King Ahaziah was 22 years old when he became King and he reigned in Jerusalem one year versus King where's the other one he was 20 he was 42 22 verses 42 then there's another one Jehovah Kim was 18 years old when he became King and reigned in Jerusalem but in chronicles it says he was eight years old so these are obvious eighteen verses eight you can see the described probably made a simple mistake even Norman Geisler admits in some of his books defending the Bible that you guess what these numerical things actually they're mistakes even he says that because there's no wiggle room you can't change what a number what does the number mean how do you interpret the number 22 so even even Geisler and others say well yeah that was a mistake in the original documents we have to admit this ancient they don't work but Yasser says that must have been a scribal error so one of the two had to be correct over the other one now we're all skeptics and I think as joe was saying earlier sometimes we skeptics are a bit overeager sometimes we want to see and we want to we want to make our point by I've been guilty of that wanting to come maybe overstate the case which scholars warned against scholars even do it as well but you've heard the claim that there's a gross mistake in the Bible because the Bible gives the value of pi' at what three point oh well it does the Bible really do that if we look in and by the way I'm gonna just I'm gonna read this verse and I'm gonna suggest that perhaps that not such a big problem there's a there's a bigger problem in that verse that's hidden that makes the inerrancy of the Bible less reliable but in second chronicles chapter 4 verse two through five we have the description in the temple of these vessels that were made and it's very detailed and there was this big huge it was called a molten sea and it was measured at ten cubits across there's a dinette diameter and thirty cubits around right how long is a cubit the cupid is about it's kind of this from here to the into your hand maybe it depends who's doing the measuring right maybe 50 centimeters or a half a yard so we say oh look at there's a mistake God gave us the value of pi' at 3.0 well of course nobody can give you the value of pi we have to round it off don't we 3.14159 whatever that is is still rounded off so some apologists suggest that well God wasn't which is rounding it off this wasn't a blueprint from which they were going to purchase materials to me it was just an after-the-fact kind of casual description and that's kind of close enough well maybe other suggests that you know how long is the cubit suppose there were these two guys measuring one guy went all the way around the outside and he says hey look it came out to the exactly thirty Wow what measurement did you get shorty you know so shorty mentioned I got ten you know cuz there is some imprecision in how that could have been done right other suggests that the the measurement was on the outside of the brim but these the diameter was measured on the inside of the from brim to brim and they actually the Bible gives the the width of that actual rim at a hand breadth and a hand breadth is what 3/4 inches so was it this pretty big thing just 10 cubits across how far is that that's a about five meters right so that's a pretty big well almost like a swimming pool right that that thing and it's also described with these these twelve oxen around it so it must have but if it existed at all it must have been a pretty impressive thing there it would have maybe the length of the stage is that about you know that five five meters or so so the you could maybe defend this 3.0 it's just sort of a casual we shouldn't be too hard to overstate that the Bible Bible wasn't trying to make a mathematical statement about any of that but there's a deeper problem in that verse if you read further it says that the amount of water within that vessel was three thousand baths that's how much water was contained in it what is a bath the bath was kind of the amount of water it took to take a bath and write a Hebrew measure of a bath and they've done some archaeology and they found maybe that value could be as small as maybe twenty liters and maybe as much as forty eight liters depending on I guess how rich you were what but a bath was sort of a measure they were trying to say how much water would fit in that well no matter how you calculate the volume of that molten sea what would it be called a fountain or something there's no way that thirty thousand baths can fit in there even at the lowest value thirty thousand excuse me three thousand it's the lowest value that would give us about sixty thousand liters of water but if you calculate the volume if it was spherical if it was like a semi spherical thing if you calculate the volume there's only room for about maybe thirty three thousand if you can do the math on that thirty three thousand liters so that was way too big of a value but maybe it was like a cylindrical thing like um like one of those big backyard swimming pools maybe if you calculate the volume of that well that still only comes out to about forty eight forty nine thousand liters so if the lowest in sixty thousand was still too much to fit in there so that seems like a problem but there's an answer and the answer requires knowing that the Bible actually contradicts itself second chronicles that I that I just referred to was written later it was written after the Babylonian captivity the chronicles were rewriting the in fact retelling earlier stories that's why you'll find many stories twice in the Bible you will find them given once and then given again and you can compare them and you can find scribal mistakes in those things but second chronicles was updating or rewriting something that had been written much earlier in first Kings if you go to first King seven 23 through 26 you find the exact same story the same story here's this ten cubits and thirty cubits and it's a hand breadth width and it's five five cubits tall give you those dimensions and so on in the oxen and all that but in first Kings it says to fill it up you only need two thousand baths so there you go there's the Bible contradicting itself and yet we can we can actually use that information not only to figure out which one of those two is right but actually which is the more likely shape of that thing if you think about it the the two thousand figure actually if you take the low end of what a bath is the bottom of the bath is and if you take the high end of the cylindrical fountain then it works because then you would come out to like forty five thousand and then that's between forty five and forty nine thousand so first Kings is more likely to be right first Kings is more likely to have got it right and whoever wrote second Chronicles who made that numerical mistake who changed it from two thousand to three thousand is most likely the person who got it wrong unless they changed their bathing habits well anywhere in Babylon and we're taking much smaller baths or something and he wanted to modernize the the story so I think that's fascinating you can you can compliment the believers in the Bible by saying yes there is an answer it does make sense but you have to it requires that one of them be wrong so sometimes a good way to show that there's outright error or or lies in the Bible is to use numbers because the Bible is filled with all these exaggerations that couldn't have been true for example there's the story in 2nd Samuel you you know the story when the Philistines took the Ark of the Covenant where is that Ark by the way people sometimes ask me what would it take for you to believe what would it take you know they never asked what would it take for them not to believe but they're always asking as atheist what would it take and one of the examples I give is well okay if Jesus were to materialize here on this stage and we could all catch it on videotape and you all saw it and we all weren't walking dreaming and if Jesus were to give us the exact geographical coordinates in the Holy Land where we would dig 8:18 feet underground and find that Ark of the Covenant I would change my mind at least I would at least my evidence would flip I would say oh that's good atheism is excruciating Lee falsifiable any number of things would falsify what we believe if evidence would come truth if the success rate of prayer for example or any prophecy that we could verify was a true prophecy that no one could have known there's all sorts of things that you could even invent that would cause you to change your mind but ask them what would cause them to change their mind and they rarely this they might mumble something during a debate they might say something well if you could prove to me that the resurrection did not happen I said oh really and then you would become an atheist of course they wouldn't but the Ark of the Covenant the Philistines had the Ark of the Covenant and it was taken away but then it was being brought back to Israel their art their precious thing to worship their God the Ark of the Holy you know it's being brought back and as was being brought back in into their area it passed by this talent called beth shemish and I think Beth Shemesh is from a Babylonia I think shamash was a Babylonian god of light or fire does anybody know that is that true Richard something like that anyway which may explain why the writer of the Hebrew Scriptures treated this village or town so badly but they were coming into this town of Beth Shemesh and there were farmers who saw the ark coming back and the farmer said it's back wow it's returned and they came up to it and they ran up to it and they they opened it and praise Jehovah praise Yahweh whatever they said back there praise what by the way I just got an email from a guy two days ago he's an Israeli living in Hebrew and he's written a book in Hebrew he thinks the first atheistic book in Hebrew in Israel called hero Israel there is no God and he might translate it into English but I think that might be a pretty powerful book but in any event these farmers looked at this Ark in oh praise Jehovah praise Yahweh praise whatever they said they rejoiced to see it and guess what happened you know that story they they weren't supposed to look at it you weren't supposed to look at the Ark that was violating God's law so these farmers were struck dead for doing this but not only these farmers 50,000 people in beth-shemesh also were killed the Bible says 50,000 people and we'll come to that number in a minute but can you imagine what kind of deity that is suppose suppose one of my kids wrote me a birthday card that says daddy I love you but they spelled love L UV and I said you made a mistake you didn't properly worship me you have to be punished and fifty thousand people in Springfield have to die because I wasn't properly worshiped I mean who could who could honor such a monster that who has to be worshipped like that but putting aside the moral question doesn't that number seem a little strange were there any towns or villages in that area in that time of history that had 50,000 people in them as far as I can tell that even Jerusalem at that time of history had maybe four or five thousand people in the whole city of Jerusalem so obviously that's an exaggeration and biblical literacy something in their brains to say how in the world did 50,000 50,000 is obviously an exaggeration it's like one of these epic tales of what happened I didn't to prove how God is and maybe it's a way of saying don't look behind the curtain don't look for the ark because there's nothing there maybe that was the way of scaring people not to look too closely at their religion but in any event fifty thousand people could not have been killed in that one city or ability to whatever it was we find examples of other wartime bragging in the Bible that Gideon for example to prove how powerful God is Gideon had this big army right but then God said is too many he looked down at the Midianites and it describes him as it was like locusts across the land like the grains of sand on the beach they were you supposed to go kill all these people right and yet God said your army is too big and you know the story how Gideon had to pare it down to three hundred people and then he went out with trickery might have happened but the numbers they gave of the people that were killed in in some of the stories in judges forty two thousand people were killed in one day in judges twenty twenty-one another twenty two thousand Israelites were then killed twenty two thousand Israelites in that one day and a couple verses later another eighteen thousand were killed and then in in twenty thirty five twenty five thousand Benjamites were killed and that day but here's the winner judges eight ten Gideon talking about Gideon in one day one hundred and twenty thousand Ephraim i'ts were killed one hundred and twenty thousand in one day that's what the Bible says so what did they do that they all just stand there and go you know and how were there even that many people obviously that's an exaggeration in the entire American Civil War the entire count of the Union deaths over that entire period was a hundred and ten thousand approximately and this was with bullets right this is with more advanced warfare we're supposed to believe that one hundred and twenty thousand III mites were killed in one day so obviously there's many other examples in the Bible first Samuel for ten thirty thousand Israelites died that would pretty much do it for that whole tribe wouldn't it and the and then in second Samuel three eight five another twenty two thousand people are killed in that one day so obviously this is exaggeration this is bluster this is military bragging this is like rewriting history to say look how great our God is and what is an exaggeration if not a lie I mean isn't an exaggeration an untruth the Bible is filled with a lot of untruth and liberal Christians will just look the other way and say yeah there's a lot of exaggerations and and there are a lot of metaphor there's a lot of parables just like when Jesus told the story of the prodigal son nobody thinks Jesus was referring to an actual person he doesn't even have a name right he's just the prodigal son there's a clue right there that it's not a real person it's a story and no one no one faulted Jesus were making up this story you don't call that a lie even as a Christian I would think Jesus made up a story to tell to make a point right he's just and if he can make up stories well maybe the ancient Israelites made up the story about Adam and Eve in fact during the debate with dinesh d'souza after I praised him about evolution and he's a theistic evolution somebody asked a question of him well if evolution is true what does that do to the story of Adam and Eve and boy did he have to waffle he had to say things like you know what there probably wasn't an atom and an evil even though the word Adam isn't really a name it just means you know the earth or whatever the out of the earth or the first man and he said there probably were other humans before just like evolution teaches whatever our modoch mitochondrial Eve was whoever she was that were she wasn't the first human so he had to say things like that which made that audience very very uncomfortable but just as the early Israelites may have just made up the story of Adam and Eve as a metaphor to explain origins and why not if Jesus can make up stories well then so could the ancient Israelites make up stories too to exaggerate and to make points well that part of my process as Indy converting was to realize the well if there's all these parables and metaphors in the Bible then maybe God himself as a metaphor maybe the big God creature himself is one huge figure of speech so I think I caught Dinesh with his pants down a number of times by the way I in order to prepare for that debate I went I looked at the video of our debate at Harvard that we did last year with Greg Epstein the humanist chaplain at Harvard by the way he's got a new book out good without God when we interviewed for today's radio show today radio shows with him and as I watched the debate I've forgotten Dinesh had said something during that debate at Harvard and I jotted this down he said I am an agnostic too there's no way we can know if God exists and we can't know if God exists I admit it but so many people believe in the world there must be something to believe and the three arguments he gave for God were just this the basic you know the first cause the Big Bang started with the singularity which was where I was able to use thick stingers remarks about how he's misquoting Hawking's on the singularity Hawking says there was no singularity now although Dinesh is trying to say that he really did prove there was one right and he still he's Dinesh is still stuck back in the 1970s the second point was the fine-tuning of the initial constants which is a real easy one to address and his third one was the resurrection and he got up and he said the only viable hypothesis the skeptics have about the resurrection of Jesus is that they all hallucinate it that's what he thinks that's what he thinks the scholarship says and there are some that is one possible hypothesis about what happened I mean hallucinations do happen but that's not the only or even the main hypothesis I think most scholars lean towards legend at least and even some towards myth I tend to lean more towards myth now than I used to before that there probably never was even a historical Jesus but it was fun to play that stuff against that southern the audience and part of the discussion also centered on morality where the [Music] where I made the claim that if if God belief gives you greater morals and why is there no empirical food to that why is there such feeble empirical fruit for that why are you Christians no different from non-christians and I cited the examples that on all of these studies even even the ones done by George Barna who himself is a born-again Christian complaining that we Christians aren't any better divorce do you know in the what religious group has the highest divorce rate in the entire country but which group actually no it's not Catholics by the way Southern Baptists Southern Baptist have the highest divorce rate in the nation and I was able to point that out to that audience and also to point out that the average clergy in America is more likely to be divorced than that person sitting out in the pew and the studies that show that in spite of all of our parents religious or not admonishing our kids to be wise in their sexual practices in spite of the fact that Christian and Southern Baptist parents tell their children there's a lot of teenagers out there and they got very quiet when I saying this in spite of the fact that there and you know you're preaching abstinence there's actually no difference teenagers are teenagers there's no difference in the amount of teenagers or who having premarital sex who believe in God in those who don't the only difference is that the ones who are more religious are using less birth control and therefore are more likely to risk getting disease and being pregnant and boy was that room quiet there were there were 13 to 18 year-olds in there and I think maybe it's in 20 year olds but so there's no difference there's no basic you know that the danger of religion is that you close your eyes to the real world so I think if you're dealing with a fundamentalist Christian people always ask me Dan when you were a fundamentalist what could I have said to you and by the way where were you guys why did everybody respect me why didn't one of you come up and say something did you were you just afraid what you know maybe I just didn't have the good luck to meet someone like you but but come up to us fundamentalist come up that it does make a difference I mean if you would come up to me I'll tell you two things you could have told me if you'd come up to me I wouldn't have D converted on the spot I wouldn't have said oh my gosh silly me there's no God but but I would have I believe would have respected and I'm only speaking for fundamentalist okay they're not all like I was most of the moderates and liberals are much nicer and much more understanding about things than that but if you want to if you are talking about the fundamentalist remember that the fundamentalist mindset is absolute istic it's it's black or white hot or cold yes or no right or wrong even in the Bible Jesus said you should be cold or hot because if you lukewarm I'll spit you out of my mouth so when you're talking to fundamentalist you're talking to a binary brain right so the Bible this word of God has to be true or false it's inerrant it's perfect to those kind of Christians right which is which is why pointing up some of the obvious mistakes that are in here is so distressing to fundamentalist and why they dig in so hard to defend this book because without this book they feel like we're ships without and without a rudder so if you could have responded to me with something about the Bible not being reliable that pulls the whole rug out from under them because without the Bible and it's reliability they've gotten nothing they're gonna have to give up their faith or turn into liberals liberal believers lukewarm who God wants to spit out of his mouth but so I'm not suggesting you have to become a Bible scholar but you can't learn a few viable contradictions you can learn a few points like this and have some of them ready and say because I imagined when I was a fundamentalist preacher I imagined that all you needed to do was just just open this and read it right just that the truth will be so obvious to you if you'll just do it and if you come back and say well I've done that I have to I've done exactly what you've asked me to Iris I'm respecting you you asked me to read the Bible okay I read it I respect it and look what I found like Mark Twain who said it's not the parts of the Bible I don't understand that bother me it's the parts that I do understand but the that would have impacted me it wouldn't have converted me but that would have made an impression on my fundamentalist mind that you actually did read it and you were actually able to say something intelligent about it and I might argued with you of course that the big one is you're taking it out of context you hear that all the time but if anybody's taking in anything out of context look at the context in which early Christianity arose look at that context they seem to think that Christianity is sort of plopped it was delivered by the stork it's just kind of there it was with no evolution no ancestors no any of that it just sort of popped into the world they're the ones taking things completely out of context by ignoring that first century and four century BC in in previous context of how their their myth originated so coming back with the Bible is an important thing to do with fundamentalists the second thing is morality because as a fundamentalist I thought the only way to be a good moral person is through the Bible in God's Word and if you could show that there are a lot of good people who don't believe in God who are doing good things Elizabeth Cady Stanton who would say she was an atheist she had no belief in a God and yet she had meaning and purpose in her life susan b anthony called herself an agnostic she was not as outspoken as her friend but in the same way they cared about real things in the real world show showed the hospitals that have been built by atheists the ochsner clinic in New Orleans in southern Louisiana was built by to atheists from was founded by two atheist from Baraboo Wisconsin and one of our members of our group dr. Wadley who just died a couple weeks ago founded a woman's clinic in Alabama point to the good things that non-believers are doing point to the lack of agreement among believers about they're supposed moral principles so you take any moral issue that we're struggling with right now in the world you name it gay marriage doctor assisted suicide what are some others abortion rights the war stem-cell research you name any of these issues that the society is struggling with and you will find devout Bible believing praying church-going good people on both sides of those issues there's no moral absolute they march in opposite March with each other and then they go back to the same churches and pray to the same God and read the same Bible so there is no Paul said in the Bible if that if the trumpet is an uncertain sound who's going to march Paul said the that God is not the author of confusion but who can think of a book this caused more confusion in the Bible really they're all over the place so the Bible the inerrancy of the Bible is important to fundamentals in the in then morality showing that you don't really need the biblical or any religious system to be a good moral person now I have a lot more to say about numbers in it but I'm going to stop it there because I'm saving it for an article and maybe we'll do questions about the foundation or any other any other things [Applause] we can go home now oh well I can't see from here the light sir yeah for the purpose of film could I repeat the question so that we get it on tape well I guess I guess somewhere back here okay oh he's asking how old would I recommend that a child be that you start giving them religious instruction without it being classified as child abuse it probably varies with this with the child but we do know that around the age of 12 or 13 with girls that's around 12 and with guides us around 13 you start to get that abstract mind before that your mind is not quite up to the adult level of being able to think in abstracts so maybe there's a good point in the Catholic Church the age of reason is 7 have you seen Julia swings play by the way where you reached the age of reason that was funny but you know when we raised our daughter Sabrina Annie Laurie and I have one one daughter she's 20 now she's away at college we didn't like we didn't indoctrinate her in atheism we didn't like sit her down make her memorize Bertrand Russell and and and fill out a little chart of eighth you know none of that she was just raised free you know and she heard us talking she's really lucky though because in Madison Wisconsin it's so liberal that the and just this term she's finally realizing how lucky it's been cuz she's living away from home and she's shocked at what the real world is like out there but through her whole schooling the Christians in in Madison Wisconsin were always a little minority in all of her classes she always had three or four atheist friends and non believing Jewish friends and that and I heard sabrina talking to one of her friends three or four years ago and they were kind of whispering and they said Sarah goes to church and they were they were looking over at her it was like she was a freak you know but that's not like that in Springfield is it it's so so we've been very lucky and in any Lori's mother hand Gaylor who's the founder of the she and an you Laurie of the cofounders of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and Gaylor says her philosophy is that you can't raise children children raise themselves parents are facilitators we provide an environment food and protection and some advice and that it but but did any of us think we were being raised didn't we all just raise ourselves and so they must pretty much let the kid think their own thoughts and do whatever they wanted and and and did a pretty good job I married one of her kids you know they turned out pretty nice without any of this overt hovering parenting and a few years ago when Sabrina was maybe 12 or 13 I just wanted to make sure you know if parents get kind of nervous you know you you're your own person you just because we're a theist doesn't mean you have to be an atheist and she listened and you know atheist a child of an atheist family like Dawkins is is not an atheist child or their own child and so if you want to be religious you're free Sabrina you know if you want it I mean we're not telling you what you have to think as long as it's your own thoughts and you can defend them and we might argue with you but you know you're welcome and for you to have if you want to be a born-again Christian someday you know you're free to do that and she looked at me and she said Oh dad I really can't see any hands from here because it's so dis light oh that's a good idea oh that's a thought that's been suggested who would be the actor Hilary Swank oh I'll have to go with somebody else but um but I'm not that I'm unusual but there's a lot of stories I know at least 25 other former clergy who are now atheist and agnostic in fact I know some atheist clergy who are still in the pulpit right now I get emails from them in they use pseudonyms and they're desperate and there's their suffering and Daniel Dennett has been doing a study he's finished it now he's doing a study of atheists in the pulpit and he and Linda Ellis Cola asked me to try to find and I get the emails from them there was a big article last year in Psychology Today in which I was featured is one of the examples of an atheist who left and so I hear from these guys in one guy's in North Carolina and he doesn't know what to do he's not trained for anything and he hasn't told his family yet and he's preaching and he's he says I'm an atheist now this is nonsense but what do I do and once a month he sneaks over to Nashville he thinks he's gonna sell some songs you know maybe maybe he can but and there's others like that so Daniel Dennett and Linda Ellis Cole of the psychologist actually visited seven of these guys they're actually in the pulpit now and they're actually atheist and don't believe and how do they feel and they've finished the article and he's looking to have it published in a major periodical or publication and then maybe draw out some more so there's a lot of stories like that after they leave a lot of them teach philosophy The Lost McCown and Pat McGuire did that some of them sell insurance that's a good fit some of them going to social work Tom Reed was a Mississippi Catholic priest who joined the priesthood because he wanted to help people and that's why he left the priesthood he thought the church was hindering and now he's a social worker he looks like a priest he talked like he just got this avuncular kind of priestly look but he's a he's an outspoken atheist so there's a lot of stories like that out there but but he if you have some money sure ok where [Music] his question has to do with roadside crosses what can we do about it in fact we have complained about it and some of our members have actually gone out and pulled them out of the ground one of them was stopped by the police saying what are you doing and he says well I'm helping you I'm cleaning up this roadside hazard and he wasn't arrested but he was charged with some kind of a crime and they couldn't take up the crime to charge him with in Colorado and eventually it's something about desecrating a holy object or something I don't know what it was but he he beat that rap really easy but I know people who put those things in their trunk and you have to make sure it's actually on public property because some properties right up next some of these crosses are on the farmland itself so you might have to know exactly and it's there's mixed feelings there because you feel bad for those people and there was a tragedy and there they want some way to remember that spot as if that made any difference but it is illegal I think in every state I think it's illegal for private people to put I don't think you can even get a permit for some of that property so maybe maybe the easiest thing to just complain call the city or the county and say or the state and say hey what this is here this should be removed this is a hazard you know what if I had to pull over and this was there they'd have to mow around it yeah well because nobody wants to interfere with somebody's private grief so oh I see that cellphone waving in the back that's a good trick is there an index of some of the most obvious numerical I don't know I just been going through on my own and digging around there might be I guess we could do that it's more fun to actually hold this book and you know do that kind of stuff but I don't know if there is well when I finish this article then I'll have a good chunk of them that we can use exaggerations like who could actually live 969 years maybe maybe that happened is there any scientific possibility that that would have happened 969 years but all you need is one for a fundamentalist show it to him show them which ones that I give you today second Kings 826 versus second chronicles 22 - one of them says he was 22 the other one says he was 42 so there's one example and Hector Avalos has written a book in Spanish SiC whether they said I've seen the USA existing and he mentions the numerical ones in there in in the spanish-speaking community they're very powerful because how can there be that kind of a mistake seems silly to you doesn't it that a numerical mistake would be that important yeah yeah the question is how do fundamentalists actually prove that the Bible is the word of a God is opposed to stories well it's faith and if there is a God and he communicates to us through writing well then why not this book of course there's a good reasons why not this book but that's how I used to think what a special way God works in wondrous ways that are not expected in a book is an unexpected way to do it of course was it Dakin so who pointed out that it would have made more sense if he had engraved the Ten Commandments not on the stone tablets but on the moon where we could all just look at them right where are they somebody remind me who said that that was a good line um but it's it's a presuppositionalist idea if there is a God then he would communicate to us through some means and here's and we have this right and there's a trick that exists and there are people who swear their lives have been changed by it and when I used to read this book I would feel I would actually open this book and read it and I would cry sometimes I would get goosebumps so I mean there's a there's a spiritual proof in fact if you ask Mormons so what's the proof of the religion they say read the Bible and you'll feel it that's basically what they say just you'll just feel it and and they know that a lot of people are going to open it and start reading and they're going to start feeling things I didn't realize it back when I was a believer but getting goosebumps from reading the Bible that's actually proof of evolution because what good are goosebumps what good are they why do we have them well we all know that our ancestors were more hairy than us and and they used for thermal equilibrium they would raise up their fur or to appear larger to a predator or to scare off another the alpha male can make himself look at big right well when we get scared or cold look what happens totally useless and there's an evidence right there on our skin that we evolved from from humanoid or ape-like ancestors okay here's I can see that hand okay she was a former fundamentalist herself and often now when she's talking with believers they accuse her of having had a false conversion you mean a false conversion to Jesus yeah I get that all the time they say Dan you never were a true Christian because if you really knew Jesus like I do then you could never leave right and I respond well I used to preach that and I used to feel that and I used to get the goosebumps and I used to feel this prayer that I can still do it today I can still speak in tongues right I'm not gonna go right now but my kid no I wouldn't do it it's embarrassing it's like asking you to make the sexual noises from your last marriage I mean it's like [Applause] but but I can do that and sometimes just to try it like once or twice a year I'll actually do that and I'll speak in tongues and suddenly my mind goes into this mode and it's pretty amazing I don't know if it's a left-brain right-brain thing I don't know what it is and I know that there's been some studies but it's real it really happens the mystical experience is powerful and I had it and I would I would I can still do it now as an atheist I can go into that mode and I can feel this like a parent figure right about here and this peace that passes understanding in a joy like wow this is great it's similar to like maybe when you're playing music or when you're making love or you know there's there are chemical they know that the cerebellum is hit with certain dopamine's and chemicals and things when you're eating chocolate and when you're doing a good deed did you know that when you do a good deed for somebody there's a little bit of a kick when you're laughing there's this so there's some kind of something that chemical that must be going on the brain cause it feels great and when I was a fundamentalist Pentecostal preacher I thought boy who could possibly denied the power of God so maybe you had experiences like that too that you knew and you felt like this voice in you and and in my book I make the argument that if I was not a true Christian then nobody is if I was faking it then so are you you could say that I thought it was real and you think but you actually don't know the Bible even says he who comes to God must believe that he exists in Hebrews you can't know it you have to believe it right so they don't really know it like Dinesh admitted I'm an agnostic I can't know if God exists or not but like Blaise Pascal who was also a Catholic agnostic he said I think we're gonna believe anyway so um you can say those things they're probably not gonna believe you but you can say those things and by the way what does the Bible say how do you judge who's the true Christian by the fruits you shall know them by their fruits so who are you to judge me it was my fruits you know my foods exhibited the gifts of the Spirit and the love and the joy and all that stuff so how arrogant of you to tell me that I wasn't a true Christian I left because I know what I'm doing and I left because of good intellectual reasons that's why not because sometimes they ask what went wrong what was the bitterness was there some bitterness in your life you know is if they tinker with that one little thing and then I'd go back to being a Christian and they or else what was the secret sin you were struggling with you hear that a lot what you know if some of my friends were telling me Dan usually apostasy has to do with a moral issue you're struggling you just don't want any moral restrictions on your life in God and be and so you don't want God telling what you do you really want to be free I did this debate in Delaware about ten years ago at Doug Wilson he's this Calvinist nut actually and you probably know him he's the guy who answered answered a Christian nation he wrote the book and answer to Harris and we did this huge debate two-hour debated and really exhausting and at the end of the debate a guy came up to the front and I thought I'd heard every Christian every question in the world I thought by now of course there's nothing new well this guy came up and said so mr. Barker what I want to know is are you a practicing homosexual and I realized later I always the next day you realize what you should have said I should have said I mumbled something about no but I wouldn't be ashamed of it I didn't want to like try to distance myself from gays I want if I if I were I would be probably would admit it but what does that have to do with the debate you know yeah but I realized what I should have said was no but now that I've met you [Applause] [Music] yeah the question is is the money we're spending on billboards worth while well we're trying it it's an experiment all right well there you go [Applause] look at this carrier here not Richard but this carrier here they gave me this and they gave Victor one of these in San Antonio they had a billboard up there don't believe in God you're not alone and the canvas from that they cut into pieces and they made these things and I think that's the bottom of the e of one of the easement that cool members of our group donate money for that and so as a nonprofit group you have to spend the money on what it's given for right there are a lot of atheist and agnostics who want that message out there we tried it I think we were the first in the u.s. to have billboards up we actually had bus signs up way back in the 70s just for a week but it caught on people liked it they saw and they said I want one in my town and that woman from Wichita is here right you had one yeah the yeah okay it was um that was the praise Darwin involved beyond belief okay with built-in st. Louis okay Oh Topeka that's right and then there's beware of dogma imagine no religion then keep religion in government separate we had one in in Grand Junction Colorado last month keep religion out of government that was up and about three days later somebody crossed out the word religion in in spray-painted black letters on it so and we got pictures of that but then so the company replaced it for us and the effectiveness of it if we're if you if you're measuring the effectiveness monetarily often they don't pay for themselves but a nonprofit group isn't a profit for for-profit group we pick up new members but what usually happens is the billboards themselves are somewhat effective but what's more effective is the resultant publicity from it the newspaper stories the TV stories from it and these TV reporters are really fun is like this the atheists are coming and they make this big visual all across the the Phoenix Valley there are five billboards and here's what they say is like a big story it's kind of cool to watch the stories and we the publicity from it like our sign in Olympia Washington last year Bill O'Reilly got really mad at us when that happened and he he went after us for three nights in a row on national TV the attack on Christmas and it was wonderful we got all these calls we feel like putting a plaque to Bill O'Reilly on our building people people call us I said anybody that he hates I am joining your group you know and when we set that sign up there I thought it was just going to be a little meeting with like 20 over and there were about 20 of our members that showed up where we gonna dedicate this the the winter solstice sign there but we came around the corner there were all these TV cameras in newspaper it was a big deal that there was going to be an atheist sign in the Capitol and that footage of me reading the sign was on the evening news and then Bill O'Reilly is in Seattle huh and so they saw that and so he ran it and then Colbert show ran it if you saw the Colbert show last December he ran that same thing about the word this attack it was really funny what he did so um so there's there's that kind of publicity that comes from it and our signs we have members who think some of our signs are of the Republic drew the cartoon for us he's the former Mormon he's the grandson of Ezra Taft Benson that former president of the Mormon Church we're good buddies now we did the show called tunes and tunes well he drew a picture of Santa Claus great Jolly rosy cheeked Santa Claus with the red and then there's this Holly and everything saying yes Virginia there is no God those buses are going all around Seattle right now and some people are crossing off the word no some people are getting an exacto knife come I don't know where they're doing it they're cutting it off and so they're vandalizing the signs but there's a story there right there's a story of you know do we vandalize their signs right do we barge into their churches and do we you know but they can't tolerate a little difference of opinion here so Bill O'Reilly lives in Seattle and he's got to be seeing those signs so I'm yeah a lot by the way when was the last time an atheist knocked on your front door you know the atheist would say I have some literature for you and it's a blank page right some java's witnesses came to my door once when we were arguing about the difference in theology is in John in John 1:1 in the beginning was the word and the Word was God and the Word was a God they say instead of God right people have been killed over that stuff sir Vedas was killed over that basic idea and I said oh you guys know the Greek and they said well yes we know the Greek and I said oh really well then let's let's explain it I went I got my Greek text and I opened it to John 1:1 and I hand it to the guy I said not explain it to me in the in you know the Greek how why are you saying it's a God he didn't know it was upside down and his friend looked up looked over at it and he said I think the word God is that round circle with a line through it and I said you're right you do know the Greek right they don't they don't know anything you know it's it was it was a fun moment to embarrass and they went back and I said why don't your scholars identify themselves why don't you job as witnesses put their names on it and they said humility they don't want anybody to know their name for humility but a Javas witness an older man and a little black boy who must have been six maybe dressed up on a on a summer day dressed up in a suit and a tie came standing beside him so when they came to the door I just ignored the man and I said this is a Saturday you should be out having fun with your friends what are you going along with this nut old man you know you should do what you know he's telling you lie and he just got out of there really fast you know that poor little kid poor little kid think what he has to do on this Saturday and he's has to be a part of this cult but you probably have better stories than I do about those things all right go ahead [Music] no I don't her question was debating a Muslim do I have to know something about the Quran and changed the debate at all or temper anything out of fear no and if I was going to fear anything it would be from a fundamentalist church as well right it's it's the extremists in any group that are causing the violence but at public debates it's interesting the dynamic is such that the people putting on this debate they're wanting to put their best face forward they're super super nice at debates even if they violently disagree with you philosophically they want to show how civil we are right so it's kind of nice going to debate with these people that are hostile to you because we're all wanting to show who's the nicest person right who has the shortest horns I guess of what it would be but I do I did notice that when I mentioned the word Allah didn't that happen to you Richard when we mentioned Allah during the Muslim debate they had to say this thing what did they say back yeah they had to review can't say the name of Allah without them at first I thought they were dissing us and but then I realized there's and all the women were on some one side with the kind of you know veils in that and the men could dressed like they want to run this side and I don't know if you remember in Dearborn we have a wonderful member of our group her name is Tracy who used to be a man I don't know if his transsexual transvestite but real tall strong handshake person and she's the kind of feminist person who really likes to overdress with these big beautiful flowery purple hats and all that I saw her walk in the back of that room wondering where she should sit should she sit over here with the women with the veils or she she stood over with the guys and she finally sat with a guy that thought was neat to see all that color out there in the back but after the debate in Queens and and I read the Quran you know I'm no expert I don't even know if I have the good English translation does anybody know what's the best English translation I have too but what's the best English or is there a best English okay well it and I will say that you have to know it in the original Arabic course most of them don't know Arabic either but but I read through the Quran and I was surprised to learn at the organization of thesaurus you know what they you know what it is just by size except for the introductory when the longest one and then they get shorter shorter and at the end is 114 it's just like three verses long so they're just organized by size after the debate in Queens the organiser Holly I went up to Ali and I said this has been wonderful you people have been so nice and gentle and generous and they gave me gifts and they fed me food and I have this little trophy they gave me I said you people are so nice and Ali looked at me and he said well done Allah commands me to be nice to you and I didn't say anything I didn't say a word because I think you should judge people by their actions right and he was a good guy but I was thinking you mean you're actually forcing yourself you're restraining yourself you really want to but Allah is telling you to be nice and I'm supposed to think that's a compliment you know what if Allah told you to be cruel to me though isn't there anything about me that you kind of like and admire as a person you're just you're just forcing yourself to be nice to me and I'm supposed to be impressed with that but but no I haven't felt any you know any fear of my once I had to walk through metal detectors again on a TV show but that was because the the host was so weird but but no it's actually very invigorating I think we're out of time here is that true JT o JT oh thank you [Applause]

Channel: Skepticon

Views: 5,672

Rating: 4.7623763 out of 5

Keywords: skepticon, hambone, productions, SK9, Nine, Springfield, missouri, talks, lecture, speaker, science, humanism, atheism, atheist, feminism, sk9, official, re-uploads, new, channel, Leaving Christianity, Dan Barker, Skepticon 2

Id: -dnMH-aBsUk

Length: 69min 13sec (4153 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 28 2017