Question Free For All

[Music] welcome to this week's episode of FFRF ask an atheist I'm Andrew Seidel a constitutional attorney and the director of strategic response here at FFRF I'm Annie Laurie Gaylor and I'm Dan Barker and Annie Laurie and I are co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation this week we're gonna be doing a bit of a free-for-all we have a lot of questions that have built up a lot from all you viewers and we're gonna go through some of those spare questions that we have and we also did a special visit here in Madison to kind of solicit a few more questions so Andrew at the beginning of the show we saw a picture of you wearing your ask an atheist shirt out you know that was out at the State Capitol that was right at the State Capitol yep well you did and asked an atheist booth we didn't ask an atheist booth me and some of the crew a couple of the guys downstairs Kris and Bruce and we actually went out there and solicited questions from passers-by it was kind of fun there's actually as both of you know at the farmers market there's always a group of creationists set up there and we even got a visit from them though they refuse to go on camera to ask a questions probably because we answered all their questions the famous Madison Wisconsin Saturday farmers market where there's what thousands of thousands browse income I think it's the biggest in the country well my speed now let's shall we take one of them yeah I think we should take one of the questions that we have I just want to know who are you reading these days and who's your favorite atheist well I think maybe we should stipulate that it has to be an atheist not in the building oh really I was gonna say Annie Laurie was my favorite well because you and your mom were the first knowing atheist that I met on that Oprah Winfrey Show and you're I read one of your books back in 1984 so just coming out of I had just come out of the closet as a minister and I read your book water the women the Bible tells me so so atheists are real people they're not just dry authors they're real people and and now of course with a free thought radio I get to read wasn't the funnest job in the world I get to read these books atheists and scientific writers and then call them up on the phone we interview that which is really nice I just finished reading Robert Sapolsky book behave humans at their best in their worst and he's a neurologist talking about how the brain and consciousness and the whole idea of a soul really is all biological so that's one of the funnest parts of my job so favorite atheist of course Dan we have to but in terms of authors I'm going to go to the classics I'm going to go to Bertrand Russell who is absolutely my favorite 80s diagnostic and his writings which I started reading in fifth grade and I always admired the clarity of how he writes and his wise words in compassion but from a feminist point of view I would have to say kind of a tie between Elizabeth Cady Stanton the woman's Bible and also all of her many writings that I got to go in and really get the depth of her writings when I did the anthology women without superstition some of your writings I read from manuscript wow we really fund the holograph and i also greatly greatly admire Margaret Sanger and so did my mother who we came to the free thought movement through the reproductive rights movement and saw that the real enemy was the church the market saying it very inspiring another great classic is Robert Ingersoll yes who still holds up today amazingly you know it was just rereading a few of his speeches and they really are they really hold up well they're great but I'm actually reading Steven Pinker right now let roles of our nature who's gonna be at the FFRF convention you guys should all sign up if you haven't come yet and then I'm also reading Christopher Hitchens letters to a young Khan contrary in which I've read a few times but it's kind of a favor what's been your favorite author he is one of my favorites and actually if if you're not sure you know where you should go for atheist writing he has a great compendium it goes back I don't remember how far he's got he's got a few that go back really really far these early atheist writing although he doesn't have very many women he does it a bit we need women you can go to women without superstition that's that's the failing of a lot of the anthologies that's one of the best ones though George Eliot's she takes down a Evangelist yeah that was him yeah it won't listen women without superstition and that's a remarkable piece of writing clergy are the most irresponsible of all stalkers I remember that there's so many though who else are you well then Daniel Dennett has a slew of books not just on atheism but on the brain and consciousness and his most current book is all about the biological basis of what consciousness is and he's a big big current atheist writer well maybe people can send in their comments about their favorites atheist I assume authors we're talking about that's a great idea share in the comments what are your favorites or come visit the free thought ha library here in our building where we have what about 3,000 volumes mostly by atheists and agnostics writers can't be checked out but you can come and we can come in and browse um and also check out FFF shop absolutely oh we are always looking for recommendations of other books to carry absolutely so let's let's go to our second video question which i think is a little bit more difficult to answer how can you be so sure that there isn't a universal supreme deity like the Christians say there is or the Buddhists or the Islamists say that there are there is just as I would ask someone who believes in God why are you so sure that there is a God why are you as an atheist so sure that there isn't Dan do you want to tackle that one first I feel like you would do that a lot in your debates well atheism basically at its core is an absence of a belief it's not a belief atheism is not a positive philosophy atheism is not an epistemology atheism isn't even a moral philosophy atheism is just the absence of a belief in God you could ask the same question about how can you be so sure there's no leprechauns for example well you can't there's evidence for leprechauns have you ever had a box of Lucky Charms and you see this you know I mean there's some evidence right but is that evidence for an actual leprechaun errs and evidence for belief in or humans ability to create culture and tell stories and come up with myths in that so there's there's the Bible the Bible is like a box of Lucky Charms there it is right we've got something here but what is it really telling us is it telling us about actual gods or not so most atheists would say at least the ones I know would say that truth is a matter of probability and even Richard Dawkins is probably the leading atheist right now would say he's he's most probably sure there is no God so if you add up the fact that there's a lack of evidence there's a lack of even a coherent definition there's a lack of good arguments for a god there's a lack of agreement among believers about the nature or moral principles of this God there's a lack of a good answer to the problem of evil and these holy books are all contradictory and all of that so-called evidence and then there's no need for God people live great lives without it all of that raises the probability that this God doesn't exist so high that most of us kind of round it off you know we say he probably doesn't exist but come on let's round it off and unless you come up with better evidence we're pretty sure that there's no God yeah I mean I think all of our beliefs are based on imperfect knowledge you know so it's not it's not really about proof the way they were they were talking about it's not we're 100 percent sure it's not about proof it's just about this is the conclusion that I've drawn based on weighing all the evidence and weighing all the arguments and also the burden of proof is on the person asserting that there is a God and exactly you know Bertrand Russell celestial teapot how can you prove there isn't this celestial teapot orbiting around it's this Hobby you can't you can't disprove most assertions of imaginary beans absolutely like if I told you I invented a perpetual motion machine if you asked me to prove it and I say no no you have to prove that I didn't is that the right way to do it do I just say you have to prove that I didn't do it well that's how a lot of theists thing you don't believe in God you have to prove there's no God actually they have the burden of proof and in the meantime we can just withhold judgment and be a theistic which is which means without it doesn't mean anti theistic it just means like a political or a moral you just don't have a belief in this God until somebody gives you a good reason but you know from the human point of view he was saying how can I be sure there isn't a god and I think that leads to this idea of Pascal's wager gee wouldn't it be safer for me to avoid going to hell by believing in something that has that threat of Hell what would you respond to that well that Pascal's wager argument and whatever form it is really is not an argument for a God it's an argument for belief in a God you better believe because the chances are right and if you think about it it's really ultimately an argument of intimidation because if you don't believe you're gonna burn you're gonna suffer and so any system of thought that has to make its argument by threatening violence which is what it basically is a tell I want to believe so I won't get punished well that's a morally bankrupt way of thinking I'm also not convinced that you can force yourself to believe something that you don't believe and then also just Pascal's wager if you're talking about they're basically making they're making a bet on the odds and they're saying it's better to believe it because I'll end up in heaven but that's only assuming that that religion is right and how many religions are there that condemn you to hell for exactly we just we just believe in what is it's the cliche atheist just believed in one view of God than everybody else so if you're a Christian then why won't you be punished by the Muslim God for not believing in the one true religion and so on yeah so Pascal's animus is pretty thin and I really like your part of the answer earlier about the Bible being like the box of Lucky Charms feel like that one's gonna be a meme did I tell you my Barker's wager to answer Pascal's wager please do here's Barker's wager suppose there is a God but he's only gonna reward those people who have enough courage not to believe in him if I believe there isn't enough evidence in other words yeah so by believing him you are risking eternal damnation right so you're better off not believing in God right absence partners wager which is stupid which is just the stupidest Pascal's wager right well let's move on I think we're gonna take a question from online now from David Dylan I believe so David asks if you have concluded that there is no God what was your first premise so it's a little bit of a hazy question I'm wondering there if he's he's asking what about the prime mover argument do you think that's what he's getting at you think you're asking for us what is the prime mover I'm not sure about Todd pretend that's what he's that's what he's asking so for me it kind of the idea is basically well the argument goes everything had to have a cause that's the rule that David's is putting forward therefore God created everything but they're actually removing God from their initial rule they're saying that God doesn't actually have to have a cause yes if everything has to have a cause then why doesn't God have to have a cause exactly and if God doesn't have to have a cause then why does everything have to have a cause so they get to this infinite regression and they try to cut it off by removing God from the rule that they've imposed in the first place and that's called begging the question because if you do that then you are importing your conclusion into your premise to begin with so you may as well not even argue me as well just say there's a god but Bertrand Russell to quote said that all ontological arguments are based on bad grammar but I think maybe he might be asking a different different question so he said he said if you've concluded there is no god what was your first premise well I think that question itself is kind of incoherent because most atheists would not say I conclude there is no God mostly if you say I don't conclude that there is and in that case you don't even need a premise you just have to withhold judgment you can just be a doubter or a skeptic and not conclude anything at all to get at the heart of what he's asking I think what he's asking is why don't you believe in a God and I think the answer I don't think there's enough evidence to yeah that's a premise I need some evidence so your premise is you're an evidence-based believer and you followed the evidence so yeah if you want to change our conclusion give us some evidence well for example if I conclude that there's no such thing as a married bachelor right that's a pretty good conclusion right because it's a self-contradictory thing so in some cases a theist could argue that by some definitions of a god not all of them sure you can't conclude logically that that God doesn't exist for example I debated as Islamic scholar once who said during the debate God is all just and God is all merciful well you can't be both that's like being a married bachelor to be all just means you're administering sentencing that meets the crime right to be merciful means you are administering a lesser sentencing to the crime you're being merciful so you can't be all just and all merciful at the same time or omniscient and also what's the word compassionate yeah I don't know benevolent if you're an omnipotent God then why is there so much misery in the world if you're omnipotent and you could stop it so it's soft contradictory so you could by some definitions you can logically conclude that that God doesn't exist but that doesn't mean you're just proving all possible definitions oh yeah the self contradictory God it's a big problem for believers so let's let's go to stamp Tammy's tutors question here Tammy asks what is an appropriate response when in a professional setting and you're in a professional setting and someone says bless you well dam has if I can quote you will say if it's a friendly environment we'll say that's a funny thing to say to an atheist and sometimes people laugh right yeah or you can say thank you for saying that I understand that you well meaning they don't they don't necessarily mean bless in the sense of some spirits are gonna come down and zap you know like in the movies they just mean I wish you well and if that's what they mean that we shouldn't be we shouldn't take it so hard that's just an expression right but if you're afraid you're gonna lose your job or alienate everybody around you you may just have to say thank you but if you're given an option to say something of course goes in tight it's German for good health and a lot of people think it's got something to do with God you can get away with it yeah and I mean it's not a problem that we run into in our professional and we actually have a related question from Steve Prosser I want to ask that now - Steve says that trending nowadays is have a blessed day or blessed day and what is a good response to that no thanks so this is a big problem if you're in the south you know you go to a grocery store and you check out you know this from the checkout counter at the bank things like that so yeah that's a little disgusting isn't it there's something about have a passive-aggressive yeah what would you say in we should come up with a quip well sometimes words can be taken in a more secular sense but because the word pray you can be secular you can pray which means to ask something of somebody doesn't mean you're praying to a god so maybe you could say well the word bless could be like I'm gonna give you a gift I'm blessing you with this gift you know in a secular sense if if they're saying bless you in order to try to impose their religion on you well then that's aggressive I think that's the point but if they're just saying bless you as a kind of common speech thing then that's different well we've touched on this too but we actually do have a question from Deanna running I was just gonna say again you could say that's a funny thing to say to an atheist or you could say have a secular day come up with some kind of rejoinder and Deanna Rhoads did ask specifically about the sneezes and you've said you say you say gesundheit okay I think assent I'd say solid which is good health in in Spanish you know have you ever wondered why sneezing is the only bodily noise people make this needs to have a comment said about I mean there's other noises people don't have anything to say when you know off coffee our with youtuber person hey why is why a sneezing suddenly require this well I probably told you this story already but um my mother was brought up by an irish-american in part who would ingest when my mother sneeze say bless the girl if she isn't a witch and unfortunately that has terrible roots because the thought was that when you sneezed a demon was coming out of you so you would bless people so the demon wouldn't come back in but you would not want to bless a witch god bless you has very primitive kinds of origin but do you think most people who say that are thinking that witches and demons they're not they're just no but they're assuming that everybody is religious it's a kind of a polite way you know I mean I would never say anybody and if it's if I'm comfortable enough I might even go far enough to say well I hope not because whenever God blesses somebody bad stuff happens you know so you could even go that far I think it's I think most people are just unthinking and polite about it but I think they have a blessed day I've encountered this before that to me that's a little bit of aggressive yeah and it's a little more a little more deliberate than just and also there was a case where a woman got fired because she was working for a regular company in Indiana and she kept tacking that on the official thank you hmm and was told to stop it and was fired and she tried to sue over this and did not win this is customer service and she was imposing what to many customers seem to be a religious mess it can be very alienating now with a quarter of the population being non-religious you don't want to be alienating but if you can find a light way to deal with it that's probably the best way you could we could do a if you really wanted to be fun or funny you could say and may Allah or and may Thor bless you they might say well you know I'm not a Muslim or I'm not a Viking and you could say yeah that's exactly how it feels for me when you say have a blessed day so say something at least say something friendly or whatever to counter this pervasive religious ideas and I think to identify yourself as a non-believer which is really vital in our society today because it's why there's so much discrimination against us because most of us are not out and religious people have many strange stereotypes about breathing yeah one of the things I always say at the end of any talk I give is the most important thing you can do for the secular movement is to come out of the closet and just be a happy polite atheist it's one of the best things you can do to help help us do we have another farmers market question do you have another farmers market question let's let's go ahead and take it as a Christian I believe that this is only a very small part of the actual eternal life that we have coming so I guess my question would be do you are you afraid to die how about it well I almost died I had to clamp SIA and childbirth well technically I did if I hadn't found you you you were passed out seizing that would have been your last memory um and I remember after that I was afraid is that because I was still very ill in the hospital and I remember feeling like I needed somebody with me I made you come and stay with me I think death is something that we're all afraid of if you're a reasonable thinking person why would you not be afraid of death but in the philosophical sense I am not afraid of death I know it's inevitable and I think that knowing it's inevitable makes this life more precious and I know that you like to quote Emily Dickinson that it never comes again is what makes life so sweet and so I think that many believers cheapen life when they say that this is only a small part you heard him say this is only a small part of my existence what does that do to his perspective about how important it is what we what we do in our consequences in this world and how you want to leave this a better place and you're not going to get some reward for it if this is its own reward it seems like a license to not live life to the fullest which is sad to me very sad yeah but and well from a philosophical standpoint I mean I think Mark Twain said something like this I think Schopenhauer said something like it where death is going to be just like it was before you were born you know it's nothing to be afraid of and I genuinely can say that I'm not afraid of death but I really don't want to die because I'm afraid of dying not death yeah and I really love being here life is wonderful and it's so much fun I don't I don't want to go away but as you say it's gonna happen to everybody so I think the key is to make the most of it oh that's like the Woody Allen quote I'm not afraid of death I just don't want to be there when it happens well and you're Emily Dickinson quote reminded me of and it's it's apropos here at the beak the first paragraph of Dawkins is unweaving the rainbow yeah a really great passage and I think it begins with ones as where we're going to die yeah because we made it to this point that we got born everybody the odds are against it go reader go Google the paragraph real quick you'll enjoy it so more philosophy here we give greater value to things that are more rare right scarce that are less plentiful things that are plentiful are you know are cheap basically so if life is eternal then life is cheap the fact that it is brief and short and precious that what's that's what makes it special the fact that we're gonna die adds more value to the life we have and as this question was asking if it's just a small piece of a larger picture like like auntie Laurie said well then this little piece is nothing this is not worth much so I think we a theists have a greater appreciation for the value in the worth of our lives than those who want to put everything off to an afterlife and I also think this is one of the things I would criticize most about religion that it displaces our interest in reality in each other and in our world and puts all of the focus on some other world some other time that can't even be proved and so we're wasting all of our energy and time and money look at the money spent on churches and on religion and worrying about sin and death and or worrying about sin and original sin and you know going to confession and what a displacement of our time and energy and intellect and compassion but there is something to be said for within this life a long picture like saving for your retirement you know I mean thinking ahead and planning but it is gonna come to an end or you could give no thought for tomorrow as Jesus yes it's very bad but also I think this this conversation highlights you know there's this this stigma that's attached to atheist which is that were these miserable people who who hate life who don't care about death and it's exactly the opposite we enjoy it and care about it more because as Dan said it's it's scarce this is the only shot we've got we've got to make the most of it that's just because we're on camera now after the show's over we're all gonna go back and wallow in darkness I remember being on a talk show in San Francisco and with my mother and the audience was almost all religious and they were asking really hostile questions and one of them was if somebody dies do you feel sad so it's the dehumanizing of atheists just because we don't believe in an afterlife doesn't mean that we aren't a human and that we hate death that we hate having people in our family die of course it's a it's brutal and I think that the sadness of death is one of the main reasons people make up religion well if they it's very hard to do if they believe in life after death they shouldn't feel sorry it's a contradiction she'd be happy when somebody dies and unfortunately we have some crazy people who do kill their children and say they're sending them off to a better world before they consume there's actually I don't know if you've seen ricky gervais TSA's movie the invention of lying yeah and there's a great scene in there where where his it's a world where nobody can lie except for him and he invents religion when his mother is dying because he's trying to comfort her so it's I don't want to sound like we're not compassionate about how hard it is to deal with death and I think the point that Dan made is right on - I mean we are more compassionate in a sense because this is the only chance versus you know they're going to a better place we're not gonna see our loved ones again you know that I think it makes it harder I think the religious view is a tad more callous actually in my mind so let's go to our next question which is actually related we'll do another video question here how do you write a sympathy card to a non-believer again I think there's an edge to that question I might be wrong but it's like oh you know you must not really feel sad about death and it's true when you go to the card section in stores dominated by horrible sympathy cards and of course what you do is you say I'm so sorry for your loss and you reminisce about what you loved about the person who has just died and you know there's nothing hard or there's no secret to it but hopefully maybe what she's asking is do not impose if possible your own religious views I mean if you say things like he's gone to a better place or you know and it's a child who's died from cancer yeah whoa that hurts yes and I think that question was coming from a genuine curiosity not not from a bad place but I mean I to me I think it is yeah I'm terribly sorry for your loss and I one thing that we like to do is to offer help you know is there anything you need or anything we can do even just bringing food can be you know incredibly helpful if you're able and I think that something concrete like that and I think that when if you know if if you know someone's a non-believer and you send them a sympathy card saying I'm praying for you from my point of view to me it seems insensitive sometimes it almost seems jeering so that might be helpful for a religious person it just you know doc oh who is it Dennett says when someone says I'm praying for you he says I forgive you I like that I'm thinking for you response is a good one or maybe this questioner is thinking that the best way to offer sympathy is to tell the person that they're gonna meet their loved one again someday and that it's not over and you can still have hope you haven't lost everything when the reality is you have lost a friend or a relative or somebody dear to you and I don't think minimizing that loss with with religion or myth is is helpful I think it's let them let them experience that loss and be there for them that's the key but I think that most non-believers are very understanding that many religious relatives will give us sympathy cards and at least we know the intent okay yes so we're gonna take a question that came in via email Tessa Ryan asked how are the Bible and Game of Thrones any different both stories seem to be full of violence incest rape and brutality what makes one a moral story and the other of fantasy yeah I mean they are the same Game of Thrones and the Bible are both fantasies and they are both brutal books I mean she was absolutely right on and it's kind of one of the reasons actually that we thought about adopting the Watchers on the wall illusion for FFRF s legal Maddy that's your brilliant idea that we write well thank you and I mean we are the Watchers on Jefferson's wall of separation so I think Game of Thrones in the Bible are pretty much the same thing but the difference is that people don't realize one is one isn't that both are fiction exactly and there's probably a little bit more magic in the Bible than there is in Game of Thrones too but but I think the Game of Thrones actors don't get to deduct their housing allowance on their IRS taxes as clergy they're just mythical characters right they don't warrant the same thing that Christian believe warrants in our kind and they do have a huge separation of state and church problem in one of the seasons of Game of Thrones but they solve it in a much different way than we do here at FFRF now I'm just in season one and haven't watched all of it but so now I'm wondering should I if it's as violent as the Bible it's incredibly violent well we have one more question Oh actually we have a couple of coming over here so Adam Wright asks lately I've found myself getting more and more impatient with and less tolerant of religious people do you feel that frustration and how do you handle it well I mean I think it depends a little bit on this setting it can be incredibly frustrating when you're dealing with a legal complaint where there's a teacher imposing religion on students in a public school it can be that you know is one of the more frustrating situations that that we deal with well III have to talk about when we were in Chattanooga and going to Dayton Tennessee to dedicate the Clarence Darrow statue in July that Freedom From Religion Foundation bequeath to Tennessee to counter William Jennings Bryan I did feel some of that irritation and frustration I mean they had read your Bible on the rake on a courthouse right in front of where our dedication was taking place and we had to do some fast work to get them to even just agree to flip the sign and then when i was leaving chattanooga i went to a bookstore and the woman asked me you know why i was here and when i briefly said oh i don't believe in in evolution i'm a creationist are you an atheist and you know that's I was kind of distraught at that point I thought come on I think in the 21st century I think if you live with it probably day to day versus us who get to come to work with like-minded people and you know most of our lives are spent in in the company of other atheists and agnostics it's probably a lot easier for us so I think that frustration levels certainly a lot lower well you were raised in religion how about you know I think it depends on the the believer of course and most of us non-believers say people should be judged not by their beliefs by their actions so we really shouldn't care if they have all these beliefs that are crazy if you want to pray to mother Goose or whatever but if their actions are causing unnecessary harm or they're mixing state and Church well then of course we should say something if they're denying medical care to their children because they're praying for them and these kids die well there's a moral issue where we should step in but in many cases I think we can just sort of back off and sort of assume the best about people until they show it otherwise through their actions like me there's a lot of people like me who were raised religious we were good people we were strong believers we cared about use you told me I wouldn't have wanted to sit next to you in a bus no you wouldn't have analyzing and I think that this person is irritated by other Cotuit US religion you know people are members in the South say they perpetually asked do you go to church what shirt should you go to it's very intrusive one of the first questions you're asked me yeah so I if you were beside me on the bus and I was giving you this good which I thought was a positive thing it would have been good if you had said something to counter it if you would have at least said I don't believe that or whatever and you can sort of gauge the person's psychology and all that but nobody wants to be ridiculed in some cases maybe we should ridicule people and slam the door in their face but in general if you want what happened to me to happen to others we want to sort of embrace them as as much as possible as people with good motives until they prove otherwise I think that I think that's a very important point I mean I think believers have a bad idea and we often attribute to people who have bad ideas bad intent and I think that's that's the mistake you're saying that we we ought to avoid and I'm all for that so we have one more question you have two more questions we have any yeah we're gonna close with a farmers market question I believe bonito de las colinas asks do you think it's important that we offer a positive vision of the world under atheism one of the problems I find is that people find it hard to leave religious movements because they think they're entering a world of niala nihilistic pointless world without morality and actually you know what I want to first told one of my family members that I was an atheist she responded so you don't believe in anything no I believe in so many things love and friendship and all this great stuff I just don't happen to have this particular belief and so I think it is important that we it's a big misconception that people have about atheists maybe one of our bigger challenges this idea that religion has a monopoly on art and community and music and somehow without that not only would you not have any morals but you wouldn't have any enrichment and I mean Dan you've done an awful lot of study of the religions of many composers for example ya know how the world has been enriched enriched by free thinkers by songwriters and authors and poets and all sorts of people that have you know dedicated their life to a positive purpose atheism all by itself and I think that's part of the problem atheism all by itself doesn't offer anything atheism is kind of like hell you know health doesn't actually offer anything at all health is just a state of being where you're free of disease right so atheism you're free of the disease of religion so if you want to live your life you have to go beyond atheism into something like feminism or a humanism or a political or social issue or a scientific endeavor or an artistic something that's positive that even believers do - we share with them these things so I think to answer that question being a good positive human being whether you're an atheist or not is good for the world and I think that many secular groups are doing charitable works as secular people today we've always done these charitable works but we haven't identified that as being part of the atheist or free thought movement so for example FFRF has created non-belief relief now but i'm code administrator of the women's medical fund abortion rights charity and have been on the board since the late 70s it was started by my mother it's helped more than 22,000 needy women in Wisconsin pay for abortions because there's a cut off due to religion on Medicaid covering abortions I mean we haven't been parodying this we're doing this as atheists but most of the board are atheists and so I think it just doesn't we're sort of I hate to say it but sort of unsung heroes I think most free thinkers do contribute to aid to charity they are volunteers but they haven't had it done it under one umbrella and so we're kind of getting smart and we're starting to do it as a group thing so that we can tell people it isn't just religion religion has no monopoly on like I remember going to Nashville a few years ago and saw Baptist Hospital right well there it is right up above the word Baptist right so they're doing their supposedly good work although you don't get much charity in a Baptist Hospital you pay the same high rates and also they get huge infusions of federal money yeah exactly and in fact a lot of the private religious hospitals are actually giving less charity than some of the others but in any event suppose it said atheist Hospital as if we were as if atheists were building us so we can promote ladies you know are a theist atheist have started hospitals and clinics and Clara Barton you know it was a freethinker with Red Cross Unitarian Creed 'less person but I also just didn't like this idea that it's just hospital you would think I can only go there if I'm an atheist yeah don't we want seniors to help everybody yeah and it's kind of like why do we have to brag about this let's just help him beings University College in London the hospital was started by free thinkers Jeremy Bentham was involved with that so atheists have built hospitals although you just don't know it and I'm pay taxes toward it but technically our public hospitals should do the work we should all be contributing toward those and maybe one thing people should go check out if they're curious about this is our free thought of the day on the FFRF website which has all these luminaries from across the ages who were free thinkers of wanting stripe or another and you can you know their contributions just by looking at their name there's thousands and you go to FFRF dot org slash day and you can sort them by name or date or you can go look up professions to see well how many scientists were famous scientists for free thinkers for example and it's astounding it is amazing science world art world music world and of course progressives and and activists so we have a question that came in online from Bill Tibbets it's a vouchers question though I wanted to get to it it's where we're switching gears a little bit here but it's an interesting question he he says that school vouchers may lead to a disproportionate future increase in Christian and Republican voters as students mature is this one of the Rights unspoken reasons for Pro voucher advocacy or one of the left's anti voucher pushback I haven't seen this reason used in the public arena so I actually wanted to mention one of the real unspoken reasons behind vouchers is not to create more Christians and religious right folks but actually to destroy the public schools and it's not mentioned publicly and I think we need to do a better job of planing that to people Katharine Stewart catalogs this in her book the good news and it's it's pretty pretty clear if you listen to some of the the big bow sure proponents that what they want to do is eventually destroy the public school systems and everyone into religious school Catherine just had an op-ed in The New York Times where she was dissing this label government schools and that's something that they pound on to make it look like you know most public schools are neighborhood schools and we have local control over them but this makes it look like the government is coming in and dictating all of these things and you know not to allow that it's a public school it is open to everybody but it's not don't call it a government school and certainly NEA and all of the other teachers unions know that the voucher movement is intended to destroy schools absolutely I kind of think and maybe there is something to this question about whether private schools lead to more voters I don't know I mean how would how would it you know Christian families can teach their kids whatever they want whether they're in public schools are private but I kind of think this Christian school movement is a little bit of an isolationist thing let's get away from the evil influences it's kind of like Christian flight it's kind of like white flight let's get out of this you know let's have our own little bubble here where we can all just take care of ourselves and teach our kids what we want without the evils of the world coming in well it's any religion right is a closed information system it can't it can't survive with all this new information about science coming in it Valarie Tirico write a great article for Slate on that a while ago I think that's that's also part of the reason for it so I think we have one more video question and then we're just gonna be about out of time so let's go to that final video question do you think it's better to raise a child as a Christian or as an atheist so we did oh you did a whole ask an atheist episode on this so on secular parenting really right we didn't so much talk about what was wrong with Christianity but what was right with secular parenting but as a new parent of two adorable boys what would you say well I think I think there's one thing to be concerned about in well there's many things to be concerned about but the one thing in particular that really bothers me is that teaching children that to be religious it doesn't teach them how to think for themselves it teaches them to accept answers that aren't answers and another I mean a second thing that jumps to mind is that it teaches them that they are special that they are part of this chosen few who are going to heaven just because they believe this thing and imparting that sort of elitism and saying that everybody else is an other that early on I think I can have some really negative side effects as we have seen in Charlotte's ville yes absolutely so what about you Dan you didn't get to talk about that well I think it's better not to raise a child as a Christian or as an atheist but just as a human being even we atheist parents resist indoctrinating our kids with atheism you have to think like me yeah because if you don't think like me well then that offends me that's this whole religious mentality yeah we teach them how to think not what to think yeah so you know like your mom gave you a Bible when you were a girl and and your brother went to church with his friends and it's like the Atheist parents are that's cool you should you be exposed to all points of view so a little I think inoculation was what she thought would happen yeah you get a little bit of the disease and then you've got built up an immunity to I mean expose you and you realize oh my gosh I don't want to be part of this so or it's like what Dawkins says there's no such thing as the Christian child or a Muslim child or a Catholic he really points that out quite emphatically in any case he can that it is wrong to label children by the religion of their parents but from a practical point of view we want to bring up children who know how to think who are free from religion until they're old enough to understand abstractions and then they can go and discover for themselves regret I don't think that we should be afraid to let them know what we think I mean that would be very I think and there might be something to the inoculation - you know my mom encouraged me to go to different churches with my Christian into temple with my Jewish friends and became very clear early on that they were all wrong rather than one of them right so yeah something to think about so in either case take your kids to church sometime so I think we've wrapped up the free-for-all but what's coming up next week so next week we're actually gonna discuss why it's important to challenge even the smallest violations of state Church separation even those things that don't seem that important In God We Trust on the money under God in the pledge and why they actually are incredibly important sweat the small stuff sweat the small stuff so join us next week for FFRF ask an atheist at the same time on FFRF channel twelve o'clock noon central time wednesdays see you then [Music] [Music]

Channel: FFRF

Views: 14,438

Rating: 4.8388624 out of 5

Keywords: Annie Laurie Gaylor, Dan Barker, Atheism, Atheist, Religion, Secular Funerals, Religion in Game of Thrones, questions about theology, questions about prayer, Freedom From Religion Foundation, FFRF

Id: vpEP_O4pUeU

Length: 45min 34sec (2734 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 24 2017