Seth Andrews, host of The Thinking Atheist, on the un-Christian behaviour of many Christians

[Music] Seth Andrews is my guest today on podcast for inquiry Seth is a former Evangelical and Christian broadcaster who now hosts The Thinking Atheist one of the most popular podcasts and online atheist communities in the world Seth has authored five books including Christianity made me talk like an idiot he also hosts a second podcast true stories with Seth Andrews with a mix of humor and heart Seth has spoken for audiences around the world about his former Faith the promotion of Science and skepticism the importance of humanism in this often crazy world and why we should all pursue a personal relationship with reality in our conversation we talk about why and how Seth left Christianity from his Evangelical Roots the Embrace of many Christians of seemingly unchristian beliefs and policies and what humanists need to do not to save the world but to make it a better place for us all I'm very happy to bring you my conversation with Seth Andrews foreign [Music] brought to you by the center for inquiry Canada a national educational charity supporting your community for reason compassion and secular humanist values you have answers we have questions I'm your host Leslie rosenblood board member and secular chair for cfic welcome today's guest on podcast for inquiry is Seth Andrews Seth I'm really looking forward to our conversation today yeah it's good to be here thanks for the invitation man I am interested in it and to talk about a number of things but I want to start with kind of your personal story I know that you grew up as an Evangelical Christian and not only that but that was uh it wasn't just your philosophy and world view but it was was your profession you were uh you were a DJ or a radio broadcaster talking about Evangelical Evangelical Christianity and and assuring your listeners how how good and true and wonderful it all was and I'm always fascinated to know how someone whose entire life is built around a particular premise uh changes Direction so dramatically because now your main podcast is the Thinking Atheist which is almost the polar opposite of uh what you did uh for for many years in your youth so can you tell us how that changed and what uh what how your how your world view changed and and what you went through personally to uh to change your life so dramatically well you know it's such a broad story I actually I'm not chilling from my autobiography but I wrote a whole book because people kept asking how in the world it's somebody who was raised in a Fundy household Christian School Christian Friends Christian music Christian Church Christian career how does that person end up an atheist activist and it's uh you know it's an interesting question unfortunately it doesn't lend itself to the short answer but you know I I was born into a family that was Hardcore and Mom and Dad were Theologian level believers they met at Oral Roberts University Oral Roberts the healing evangelist quote-unquote healing evangelist and they honeymooned in the Holy lands my mother wrote a Greek New Testament study guide that was used at the college level I mean these were not lightweight Sunday go to meet and Christians they were the real thing and um that was really our normal everything was Jesus and God and Jesus and God it was very Puritan kind of a culture and if you're raised where that is normal you you just don't get introduced to the rest of the world you become afraid of other ideas you're reinforced in so many ways to not tap on the glass to not ask the hard questions and uh you know I spent three decades as some flavor of Christian before finally admit life I started to give myself permission to ask those questions to you know to to say maybe I'm you know they like to say that who are you to question God how does the insect brain how do we as the ant in God's Ant Farm understand you know and I always thought well I got tired of that explanation I thought no I I don't think a benevolent God would be the the confusing mysterious ways God I think he would in fact be the God who was not an author of confusion and so I started to tap on the glass ask questions take the hard journey that was 2007 and and lo and behold the dominoes started to fall you know God is is all powerful and all good why does why does why does evil exist was uh uh there were there was there was more to it than that but uh was it was just that you were looking at the world and it wasn't consistent with the existence of an all-loving all-powerful God yeah you know it wasn't just the problem of evil or the problem of needless suffering of the problem of divine hiddenness it was so many gears again I wrote about this but when I was a Christian radio host in 1997 we had a very popular and beloved Christian artist his name is Rich Mullins and he sang a song that still beloved in Christian circles today called awesome God our God is an awesome God and he was just kind of homegrown uh sort of this raw unpolished Jam of an artist that people really really took personally and she was horribly killed in a car accident in 1997. and it was charged to me and my co-host to go on the air and tell our listeners you know he was horribly killed here's what's happened and then I was designing the website page the tribute page and I remember as I was writing the the headline it said welcome home Rich meaning God had called him home and the whole time I was writing the page I thought I am creating a mechanism for coping like this to me does not make any sense God brought this guy to the Forefront of ministry beloved by millions all around the world and then what he has his body shredded in the middle of a highway after he struck by a semi in the middle of the night makes no sense we are the ones who are writing a happy ending to this story and that was one of the first seeds that really started to implant my best friend came out to me as gay in the 1990s and I was of the opinion based in the Bible's teaching that's homosexuals are in Rebellion against God and might be damned to hell and we didn't speak for a year after that Revelation until I realized that you know I missed this guy and he's still the best person I know and so I sort of took white out and sort of you know removed that part of the Christian doctrine from my life and thought well you know God wouldn't judge him and and then 911 was big I saw everybody invoking God whether it was Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson saying that God was punishing us for gay people you know we saw the Islamic terrorists who were invoking God as their excuse you know all of you praised we're going to go and wipe out the Infidel and mostly I just saw action Human Action and reaction I um also had been doing work after I left Christian radio with a lot of churches I I produced fundraising videos for churches all around the country we raised millions and millions of dollars for church work one thing about flying every weekend to a different church and spending all this time inside different Church houses and speaking to their clergy and their members and their deacons and all these things is you really get kind of a sampling of I don't know the humanity of it and how they were all kind of doing their own thing making it up as they went they each had their own kind of flavor but no one seemed to agree and and the human-made aspect of it all of these gears really were turning in my brain and that plus I think the the impatience at midlife with trying to keep other people happy I think as you get older you become a little less interested in whether or not you keep the peace right have you noticed that it's not even really peace it's one point it's just an absence of conflict well I'm not going to say anything because so-and-so is going to lose their mind yeah and I'm going to keep the peace but but that's not really peace that's just an absence of conflict I was the one sitting on their hands and I finally came to the point where I thought why am I sitting on my hands what kind of a benevolent just God would punish me for asking good questions and wanting good answers and despite my fears of Hellfire and getting it wrong and losing people friends family my job I was worried about all those things I decided to press on and man when you start asking questions so yeah it's amazing the doors that open it's amazing the things you discover so actually well a podcast for inquiry and and the center for inquiry Canada and really like my personal journey is all about asking questions and seeking uh genuine answers uh and so what doors open for you when you started asking questions I'm I'm fascinated by this process you know I was here's an example I was taught to distrust Evolution we call them evolutionists right right evolution cultists of evolution right I didn't know what it was I'd never read Darwin's On the Origin of Species I'd never read the work of any biological scientists at all I got all my science from these religious books where their science questions were things like um you know asking uh why God loved the color green when he made the trees I mean this is totally empty calorie quote-unquote science questions that there were just indoctrination but I I wasn't taught what evolution was I just knew it was wrong and I was trained to mock it and make fun of it so here I am at the age of 37. and I crack open The God Delusion by an evolutionary scientist and that leads me into other books by evolutionary scientists and it's not the caricature that I'd been taught to fear or ridicule you know from goo to the zoo to you that's kind of how they framed it oh you know one day a rabbit wakes goes to bed and wakes up and gives birth to an ostrich you know that's kind of the how weird right and and of course that's ridiculous and you should I can see why you would dismiss that as crazy it was really it was taught to us in a way where the the was it just a straw man you know they they just there was no understanding of how Evolution worked evolutionary processes threatened my specialness because if I am an evolved creature in a universe that doesn't necessarily take me personally then I am not the most important thing in the cosmos I am not the center of the Divine King's attention I have not been adopted into his family and will be sent out on a crusade for his cause and then one day get a mansion and pearly gates and a crown and all those things maybe I'm not all that special and so this idea that I am actually part of the evolved World in my mind at the time it was a threat it was maybe I'm not all that kind of thing and then you know it's interesting when people talk to me about how arrogant it must be how arrogant the non-believers are the people who holded the science of evolution are so arrogant I've heard that a lot you want to be Gods right you think you're it and there's nothing above you and Beyond you and therefore it's all about you and I always have to course correct them and say well no no I'm now fully aware that I live in a universe that does not care what happens to me next and I'm a blip on a blip you know among hundreds of billions of galaxies and so that's a kind of humility that actually came as I began to understand how the processes of life the universe and everything work and and contrary to what some people might think it didn't freak me out didn't make me feel worthless or purposeless it didn't rob me of my joy it actually gave me a greater sense of awe and wonder about the world about the Universe I live in it actually has made me more grateful knowing my place in the universe as small as it is yeah and for me it also like that perspective which I share it drives my purpose as well because I realize if things are going to get better it's only going to be because of our efforts it's our responsibility to make our lives and I'm talking collectively both like both individually and collectively but there's there's no one else guiding the process so if we want to make things better for ourselves and for our communities our countries and our and our species and as a globe it's it's our Collective responsibilities to make the changes to make things better uh there's no uh I I like the phrase uh there's no Celestial safety net that's going to stop us from doing harm to ourselves or to each other or from going extinct that has to be our responsibility and that is you have to be an adult about it uh but with that responsibility becomes uh a motivation to all right let's let's make the change that we want to see in the world well and you touch on a couple of I think really critical things one I think is is the idea of God showing up to essentially sweep up right like whatever I mean it's all temporary we're all going to go to a hidden happy place in the sky one day so we can torch the planet and abuse resources and we can just be as Reckless as we want they don't say it that way but it's really kind of the attitude that this is all the resources God gave us dominion over the planet the animals Life trees grass oil you know what air whatever we it is now all under our dominion and we can use it up in fact we're supposed to use it up and if we make a big mess in the process who cares because this is not our home this is just a temporary stop on our way to home God's going to wipe out the Earth anyway and that's hugely problematic because we see whether it's climate change deniers or other type of science deniers or people who are simply acting in cruelty and with tremendous amounts of waste and irresponsibility as stewards of the planet you see they just excuse it by saying it we're going to heaven anyway that's really a problem it also I think directs us to why we need to solve human problems because I think that one of the big things that feeds God belief in this world is suffering if you find people who are in disadvantaged situations who are going through pain whether they were born without a penny or they're going through cancer whether they had a child killed in a car accident or whether you know they are being impressed by a a government in Iran I mean whatever I think as long as you see people who are looking up aching for a happier ending saying I need to be in a better place I will one day have a better body my problems will one day be solved well that's when the religious uh sort of stories become very attractive they become a coping mechanism and so when people ask me well how do you counter religious um superstitions how do you there's all these magical claims in the world do you think they'll ever go away and I'm like well I don't think as long as there is suffering people are ever going to totally get rid of magical thinking because they will be aching for a magical solution to very real problems and one of the best tactics that we can use if we are going to create a less dogmatic less Fundy less superstitious more rational world we have to alleviate human suffering we have to solve each other's problems and so that's why even though I host a website that has atheist in the title I'm much more a humanist as an activist humanism is kind of my thing right I I can understand that that's the the call to uh call to activism rather than just stating that there's this very common belief in the world that I that I don't share and that's a great segue into another topic that I want to talk about which is which is politics and what to my mind is sort of the odd convergence of uh what you were describing the incredible waste in using uh uh and abusing the resources of the world with uh with with Christian with with Christian thought I mean I if if you read you know at least certain segments of of of Jesus's teachings where you know you should feed the hungry and clothe the naked and and alleviate poverty and take care of the poor these are all good things and but seems to be uh to use to use the word pejoratively the way many on on the right in the United States do these seem way too woke for real Christians to to even contemplate and I'm I'm wondering how did it's you can object to Christianity either on um sort of physical grounds or like we we can observe that the god claim is doesn't hold up to scrutiny but increasingly it seems to me we can reject Christian uh teachings on moral grounds what the at least but the loudest voices in Christianity are are talking about are the the rejection of of of homosexuals of of trans kids of of uh women's bodily autonomy and they seem to be on the wrong side of so many moral questions almost in contravention of at least some of the scriptural teachings and I'm wondering how did that happen and uh I I I you had almost an inside view of things for a while and I'd be very interested in hearing your insights I'm seeing a clash of cultures you know it's like people like to talk about Christians like they're one thing yeah I mean there are there are very much liberal Christians too there's a congregation just down the street from me that portrays the uh uh the LGBT flag and so it's not a monolithic group but they seem to be uh they seem to be a minority uh and and almost a you know counter-cultural well you know we tend to make religions in our own image in many cases it's like when I have Amanda Tyler who is the founder of Christians against Christian nationalism and she's a devout Baptist she is fighting the Christian nationalists the anti-uh you know the LGBT bigotry and and the anti-human rights culture this wave of Cruelty and hatred and inequality she's fighting that she's my ally in that way and I had a conversation with her and I was like well how do you Jive all of this with the Bible's take on women you know silencing women and all these types of things and in her responses I realized that she was speaking about a Jesus that most fit her moral compass and I find the same is true on the other side of that coin I think people who embrace the anti-gay and the the anti-equality and the cruelest verses of the Bible hell theology those types of things I think that's something it feeds something in them I think maybe it's an excuse for the own for the for the bigotry and the cruelty that they feel inside I I think our Gods often Look a Lot Like Us there are so many gears in that machine though including the priming of devout fundamentalist religious people for conspiracies and for authoritarianism and I think this explains a lot of what has been going on the Bible Christianity itself is a conspiracy theory the story of Christianity right a plan is put in place and now the evil agent is trying to thwart the plan but he will not succeed because our spies are in their midst and their spies are in our midst and there's all of these you know mechanisms going Christianity is a conspiracy theory and so I think we're seeing one of the reasons why all these wacky stories that come out Q Anon Etc get lapped up so quickly by magical thinkers is because they have already been primed to respond to the Fantastic to have those emotional things those those nerves struck and they go aha yes it must be beyond that Christianity Islam Etc Fundy religions are by Design authoritarians they teach you to become a sheep they are an attack on the self right there is no one worthy no not one uh more of Jesus less of me right not me but Christ who lives in me essentially it is surrendering my identity and then I follow the identity of a leader or a group or cult we do this with Yahweh we do this with Jesus we see that it done with uh Pastor Shepherd figures within religions they are my shepherd I am the flock they teach I learn they lead I follow right don't question too much because obedience is what is commanded of us by The Authority with a capital A so now you have a culture primed for authoritarians who are waving Bibles and invoking the name of God those people come in and can command immediate attention Donald Trump knows nothing about the Bible he knows nothing about Christianity I'm convinced he doesn't care at all about God doesn't believe in God and I think he is the only God in his life right but all he had to do was to show up wave a Bible he does not read and invoke a God he does not believe in and people primed to respond to authoritarian figures lapped that up and they said that is my shepherd I will now follow and I think sociopaths and cult leaders of all Stripes have learned the power of authoritarian thinking and maneuvering and we see that with so many people out there Ron DeSantis and others you know I don't know we could talk about the sociology behind religious thinking all day but I think you know those are a few of the key things that I've been seeing yeah and and that type of surrender to a higher uh Authority uh or something then you know it's a higher authority because they told you it's a higher authority and I mean ultimately the way I've had it conversations with uh many Christian friends is that God is a bully and you have to you have to obey him because he is all-powerful and if you if you defy him you're going to hell and if you oh if you listen to him you're going to heaven and I thought like that's that's not a moral position that's that's as you call it it's an authoritarian that means god is a bully and then you're not believing in God because of his goodness and because it's the right thing to do you're doing it because you're scared of hell and you don't want to do that and you're cowed by that and it's it and it does that speak to the response the eager gleeful response to the bullies right we see healthy demonstrations of strength in this world you know people who can use their strength to lift others up to heal wounds to build Bridges to create things and then you see others and they use strength to bully and to be cruel and to break down and to condemn and insult and devastate and smash everything that's in their path and there is a culture of people even and perhaps even especially within the church the American Christian church right now and they admire the cruelty of someone like a Donald Trump Etc because they see that as strength right if we're on the side of right and we are strong we will then go and defeat the enemy crush the weak the weak of course or under the influence of Satan and I think it's the celebration of Cruelty that is the most disturbing to me there are so many Christians if my mother had raised me to behave like Donald Trump right I bragged about groping women and I had built vendors out of their money and business deals and I had used the lord's name in vain and I had lusted and I loved money if I'd done all of these things that Christ said never to do my mother would have thought I failed as a parent failed I could I've raised you are the antithesis of what I wanted in a good Christian man but when I bring up Donald Trump immediately that tone switched and she's like what a great man of the Lord and I just can't help really oh my God absolutely and I can't I can't help but think why the double standard or does she consider that to be he's a warrior right it doesn't matter what else he does as long as he is he he's God's man so the ends justify the means I mean I I this conversation's kept me up at night okay yeah I mean I'm I'm Canadian and I've I I've looked and and uh and it's that uh merging has always struck me as as bizarre because here is someone who is multiply married uh philanderer uh the the crude and really in his presentation is about as ungodly a person as one could concoct even and yet from my perspective up in Canada he said I'll put Supreme Court Justices and Outlaw abortion in the land and it just seemed like the evangelicals above that priority trumps the fuel pardon upon trumps everything else and so we're behind you 100 and we'll forgive all of these things that we have condemned in others for decades uh is that off base or does that no it's absolutely it is absolutely true that a single issue candidate can run and this is why Trump changed his own position on abortion right before he ran for the presidency right because it used to be pro-abortion and then we became politically expedient when Iran is a republican he switched and said abortion is wrong and then he concocted these tremendously crazy insane stories about you know abortions in the operating room in the delivery room at you know eight months and 29 days and 23 hours as they ripped the babies out and then twirled their mustaches and laughed and blah blah blah he had all these horror stories he totally misrepresented what Roe v Wade even was but because he landed on what the Believers considered to be the right side of an issue that might result in Murder if you get it wrong right he is a pro-life candidate the switch goes off for everything else because what could be more important than protecting the life of a baby so now anything else he does ah you know he's imperfect well the Lord sometimes uses imperfect people the king Cyrus argument comes to mind but you know at least he's on the right side of this I've also seen other people where it's totally just tribal you can be the worst person in the world as long as you're a republican right anybody but the Democrat anybody but the other so I don't have a sense of what's right and what's wrong independently what is right and what is wrong is defined by what my party says so if my party said something is good then I'm 100 in favor and if they say that it's bad I'm 100 against it I'm not coming to my own conclusions about what's right or wrong I it's defined by others is that what you mean by tribalism yeah well it's like the worst person in my in-group is going to be better than the best person in the out group there there's so much of this othering that we see and everybody does it I did a whole speech about tribes and how tribalism or in-group models communities in some ways can be very healthy it's part of who we are as human beings communal creatures and so we will gather and join together when it comes to family or shared interests or shared values or whatever I mean football fans are tribes people who go to a rock concert for a certain group that's a tribe of people who enjoy that genre uh you find people who on bowling night you know everywhere you got churches what's church if not tribalism and we can see sub-tribes in Christianity how many splinters are there of different types of Christians and they have their own in groups and so we see all of this but the dark side of it is is as we other people we become the superior they become the inferior we are inside they are outside well the worst of our in-group is still better than the best of their animals I've had people who have uh they have been aghast when they find out that I am an atheist but they were more aghast at the fact that I voted Democrat and they didn't ask any questions they didn't ask any question like where did that come from and what are your what do you think what was was the platform and what you what's your perspective there was no meaningful dialogue it was just the r and the D and that's all they needed and then they became sort of huffy and dismissive and I felt that sort of sneering disdain and you know it's I think we see a lot of tribes and tribalism that feed a lot of what we're doing you know trust the in-group everything the in-group says distrust everything the out group says I mean q Anon what's Q if not tribe right we know more than everybody else we're smarter than those other people who've been deceived they you know they they trust science they trust the historians they trust the news uh we're we've outsmarted everyone and then they get together in their clicks and they pat each other on the back they're fortified in how many different ways as human beings as a tribe I don't know there's so so much going on there yeah there's there I mean any form of group Identity or or tribe Fosters in-group Amity but it comes at the expense of outgroup enmity and and that's I think one of the reasons that we see some of the more egalitarian and even humanistic people in this world are the ones that travel more those who get out of their bubble and introduce themselves to other people other ideas other values other cultures other everything they tend to be the people who are less fearful who are less conspiratorial who are less worried about things like National borders and waving the standards of our country over them and and sort of this personal superiority and they become more about us as brothers and sisters on planet Earth and this has been studied I find it very interesting that those who are more apt to retreat into a bubble they more apt to live behind their walls that's where you really see bigotry and fear start to Foster but those who open the doors and introduce themselves to the world all around them I think those are the people that become less judgmental more egalitarian more humanistic in that way well when you actually meet other people you realize that they're other people yeah right they're not these these monsters or these degenerates these caricatures that are painted to you that I go don't be like those those people that and and you know all these negative traits associated with them if you actually know them and and speak to them you'll realize they're probably in most ways a lot a lot like you you know they you know they they have their their loved ones they probably take care of their family want the best for their their kids and their parents and their friends and themselves and are working towards towards those goals and are not at all like the the monsters that they have been portrayed at but to counter that narrative you actually have to have some knowledge that comes from outside that self-reinforcing system from from within the tribe and so I think that I think that you're right about uh about exposure to the world when I meet somebody I live in strawberry Red Maga conservative Oklahoma USA okay okay and so when I go out and I'm introduced to somebody I don't lead with hi I'm Seth I'm an atheist activist right I just don't do that because that first of all it's not that's not what I lead with it's not my being an atheist is not my identity um I lead with I'm Seth and it's like on my tennis team there is a group of a few highly religious people and we knew each other from the tennis court I am Seth nice to meet you we play match we all hang out we enjoy each other maybe occasionally we'll all go out and have a burger after the game weeks pass before they finally really find out what I do for a living and had I led with I'm an atheist before they got to know me as a three-dimensional flesh and blood human being they might have just winked out and dropped out they might have just cut that cord said we don't want to be even be on the court with the guy but because they got to know me as a person first because they thought well he's a guy who's fun to be around he loves his wife he seems to be a person of good moral character and he's we enjoy his company wow I hope he shows up to the next match and we'll all go out right you have that kind of thing and then when they find out that I don't believe in any God anywhere it's a whole lot harder to write me off it's a whole lot harder to put me in a box and then Crush that box because they've already seen me as someone who shares the planet with him in a very human way and I think there's a lesson there so often we we lead with labels and you know atheists and Libs and everybody we can all be guilty of doing that to other people and I'll tell you it frustrates me because I I we like to think that we're immune from this sort of binary thinking this cookie cutter highly tribalistic othering but everybody does it you know liberals do it to conservatives atheists do it to religious people everybody does it to everybody and none of us are immune and I don't think it's a sheet and it's not a false equivalence argument to say that we all need to be very aware of our biases of reductive thinking and perhaps being unfair there are a lot of horrible people in the world but not everybody that we have labeled in that way may fit the label we need to go deeper and I think that's fair yeah and I mean it's in many ways it's exhausting to always come up with your opinions derive them from first principles and and we use heuristics and shortcuts and uh some and but when you don't when you don't go and and really delve into why you think something or what your opinion is and right down to the various sources uh when you do take shortcuts that you you can go astray but it's it takes a tremendous amount of discipline and honestly there's not enough time in the day to do that for everything that you see you need to rely on sources that you trust or or parrot arguments that for one reason or another you found persuasive or to reuse the conclusion that you came to before and say this situation is close enough to that other one and I'm going to do that again I think it's a very understandable human trait and I agree we are all susceptible to it but it uh it is it can be a very a very dangerous uh uh aspect of our Natures that allows us to uh either condemn or unquestionably condemn or unquestionably accept uh propositions or people or or arguments uh with insufficient or uh uh non-existent evidence I you know the Twitter verse hasn't helped right I mean we live in the 280 character Twitter verse yeah I don't know I still call it Twitter because it'll always yeah I I I I know nobody I know actually refers it to it by X it's uh it's still Twitter in everyone's mind you know if I see someone and I see them say one thing I may just totally go way off the chain and assume a bunch of other stuff about them I will treat people so differently online that I would ever treat them if we were having coffee together and I think the technology of the internet that is so connected us is also so very much divided us it's made it it's never been easier to Tar and feather somebody to just roast them alive from a distance from our distant Vantage and it's the dehumanizing that really really bothers me you know we the internet's you know in in the uh technology and the time of hits and clicks often monetized hits and clicks people have monetized our outrage they know where our buttons are they know how to push them and they often get paid for doing so maybe we get paid with an endorphin rush because we get to feel Superior and then everybody rushes to our defense and it's US versus them and it's a war online and days past as we keyboard Warrior ourselves into it into Oblivion and I've had to step away from that a little bit because it started to affect me you know just seeing the non-stop conflict and the vilification and the drama and the unnecessary escalation it's it started to really kill a part of my heart I felt the scar tissue there and I had to really start to partition away a lot of that and find Opportunities to re-humanize and then I started doing this experiment then it happened just a couple of weeks ago somebody relatively public figure popped onto my page after I'd said something they disagreed with and they snarked pretty pretty hard at me and okay fine My First Response my first thought was I can get my snark on all right I've got a sarcasm Gene I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna I'm gonna hit him I'm gonna throw the Zinger at him but I stopped right and I said hey you know I just want you to know that pre first of all I'm a big fan of your work no kidding I follow your stuff I I just think your stuff's amazing and I I think we stand apart let me tell you what I was thinking when I typed this original thought so instead of saying you idiot why would you come to my page to complain blah blah blah and then go on the defensive I use the language of de-escalation and I said I appreciate you let me kind of tell you where I'm at and then tell me what you think about that he came back and said man thanks for kind of the high road response I really appreciate you kind of here's what I was thinking but I totally understand and all of a sudden the temperature dropped and we became friends and it wasn't about winning it was about sort of interacting And discussing and being people and I've been trying that more and more and it's amazing how often I'm seeing success instead of knee jerking into keyboard Warrior mode and trying to win uh when it comes to the everyday people I still go hard at the public figures you know the Marjorie Taylor greens of the world you know the Mitch McConnells of the world will never get quarter from me uh I I think they're fair game but in the everydays and the one-on-ones when I might be dealing with someone who is not the devil I've really tried to change how I approach them and it has improved dramatically my experiences in and it's improved the conversations I've been having online I don't know forgive me I just kind of went off on a bunny trail there but it was what was on my mind this is important I mean one of the things I'm trying to do with podcast for inquiry is to have intelligent and nuanced conversations on complicated and sometimes uh controversial subjects uh never with Rancor or at least I do my best uh never with caricature but to explore a topic and and try and lead by example of uh we how you can talk about difficult topics either because they're difficult uh emotionally or they're just inherently complex and so they're challenging to understand and and and to give people more than just a surface level understanding over the course of you know 45 minutes or or an hour uh I I hopefully we're succeeding with that um but I think that's similar to what your goal is with the with the Thinking Atheist uh how would you uh how do you see trying to restore reason and de-escalation and actual interaction rather than flame Wars into uh not just not just in not just into the interactions that you have with others but as as part of the of the public discourse and and to resist the urge of demonization of someone who dares disagree with you or criticize yeah it's a balancing act for me I have worked really hard to Shield The Thinking Atheist content from drama and every tribe every group every organization every culture has seen drama they've seen strong egos strong opinions conflict escalation sometimes necessary conflict to necessary escalation I think sometimes you do have to to root out bad agents you have to expose the awful and sometimes those can be really unpleasant moments but I've also seen a lot of people who they just go in and they just make it freaking worse and then they go public and then someone else does a response blog and someone else makes a video and there's a response video and then there's always everybody's choosing sides everybody's shouting nobody's listening and I've been desperate to protect this audience from that not with a head in the sand approach but my listeners and viewers don't show up at the show because they want to hear what so-and-so whispered about such and such or two egos clashing and colliding and having and airing all their dirty laundry they're not there for that they're there to to have Community to be entertained and learn things and I put myself in that camp because the guests I have on so many of them so much more educated much smarter than I am I'm learning along with the audience it's a place where I'm not opposed to a Believer or someone challenging me on the phone or calling me on the show or giving me you know some pushback here and there but it it is a culture that is really dominated by kindness and it's not weakness it's not acquiescence it's strong it's I think kindness should be strong I think this idea again we're back to the the whole culture of Cruelty some people think in order to to be strong you have to crush others but I don't believe that at all I think sometimes the easiest thing to do is to throw a tantrum and break things I think that that's any seven-year-old can do that to be true they have tempered mature strength is to find Opportunities to lift others and so I have promoted on my show a culture of kindness when it comes to Everyday People I'm very very kind when it comes to people who share my former faith I am married to someone who believes in God she's more of a deist but she came out of a culture where she called herself a Christian and she is the best person I know and I I think people are hungry for that to re-humanize these conversations because if we don't care why would anyone listen to what we had to say how do you how have you done that like you're the Thinking Atheist has been around a lot longer than podcasts for inquiry what have you done to inculcate a culture of kindness uh in in the in your show and in the community that you have built up over the years well first I have made a pledge not to take all of the bait that gets thrown out right I mean we there are people desperate for our oxygen I see apologists I see trolls I see agents of chaos and they are desperate to jump into this spotlight and cause a stir and get attention get noticed they are desperate for oxygen that they want me to feed them I have made a pledge not to do that I'm not saying that I don't ever engage people with bad ideas but in the in the internet era if you stop and trip on every Pebble you will never ever get anything done the second thing I have done is to lead by example the tone and temperature of what I do what I say in the way I say it warts and all Flaws and All is it's real but it's also kind and that if that affects it affects the podcast it affects how the website's done it affects how the the social media pages are populated and that's sort of a top-down thing the other thing I I have done and I don't know if this is the right decision is in order to avoid conflict and drama and all those types of things I work pretty much alone I've got a few people who have volunteered their time and I've got uh you know they've they've been wonderful but I'm paranoid about having a staff because I don't know how much time I have to be able to vet people and will they produce content in the way that I feel like it needs to be done and what happens if there's a blow up and then everyone goes public and I've just become I've got such a bad taste in my mouth about some of the other free thought groups that have had inner politics and drama and explosions and it's all gone so very nastily public that I've just myself thought well even if it limits what we are uh you know I I'm going to protect uh the the the model the engine of The Thinking Atheist podcast and content by not allowing Rogue agents the opportunity to come in and I don't know if that's the right decision you know I I but it's kind of a it I'm not sure what else to do I'm also a little bit of a control freak maybe I just don't want it it makes it very much a Seth Andrews production uh instead of an institution of it it's like it's like if someone if someone's if I say I want you to to find some content to post on social media that person what if they grab something that that makes fun of religious people and calls them a slur or what if they what if they post something that has not been vetted and has been debunked that comes from a conspiracy site but it just happens to be pro-atheism you know then that that diminishes the power of what we do it kills credibility it's just wrong and uh so to develop the mechanisms where I know that good vetted content that fits the attitude of this community that's been hard for me I'd love to be able to do it but I just haven't got to the point yet where I feel like I can trust myself to to to develop it and I worry about all these strong personalities in one place having seen so many blow-ups elsewhere so it's it's an imperfect compromise for sure yeah something that I've struggled with a lot is uh just finding being able to determine uh a principled disagreement I mean we're we're both humanists but we may have very different ideas on on uh politics or or even if we agree on values the relative uh priorities of them and what practical actions we should take and do we compromise here to make an incremental Improvement or do we hold out for to get the full uh the full thing that we want and these are all good faith arguments to have uh and and they need to be they need to be worked out in groups but uh there are also Bad actors you you mentioned earlier there there are trolls and uh agents of chaos who are who are just there to try and uh uh get clicks or or to disrupt the conversation that uh that are having here and unfortunately I have not been able to figure out and efficient way to determine if someone is disagreeing with me in good faith or or just disagreeing or because they they want to start an argument and that uh uh I don't know if you have any insights on that but uh I that might just be another way of rephrasing the challenge that you're having which is why which is why you've kept things very very close to the chest yeah I think the word that you and I are really sort of revolving around now is intent how do I gauge the intent of an interlocutor there are some people out there and I've seen some of my fellow liberals and atheists who they don't care at all about what somebody's intention is all they care about is the end result of what they do so somebody who's got good intention who is not trying to be the villain in their own story may have a bad idea okay or a disagreeing idea and there are some who are like well I don't care what your intention is all I know is that people are being hurt by what you're doing therefore you are now my enemy and I must Crush you and I find that unfortunate because I think well you know if this is a good person with a bad idea welcome to humanity right welcome to me I'm sorry I'd like to uh Seth Andrews okay let's see he's a Biblical literalist he was a uh an anti-gay bigot he was a Christian nationalist who believed the country belonged to him and his people more than all others he was you know xenophobic he was conspiratorial he was all these things the second guy you described doesn't sound very nice I deserve to be destroyed right because I am I'm a horrible person or I'm an idiot or uh you know whatever and I'm like no I was a good guy who had been the victim of bad ideas and I simply needed a chance I needed someone to approach me in good faith people changed their minds from a position of safety you will not attack people into better ideas and I get so sick and tired of people being like I'm going to insult someone until they know how stupid they are that's not how identity beliefs work and that's not how minds are changed just a few episodes ago I spoke with David McRaney and he wrote a book called How Minds change and this was exactly what we spoke about and that is the thesis of his book he wanted he saw people like you who you know changed their minds about something so Central and so core to themselves as well as trivial things along the way and he was fascinated by the process and and you're you're right people uh will if they're attacked they'll put up their defenses and and and not not change their mind they don't evaluate your arguments if it's coming at them uh with the intention to to hurt insult belittle or demean it has to be a uh more of a interaction and a Meeting of Minds and and of equals and then they have to go away and think about it because uh there might be a flaw in your arguments that I can't come up with over the course of a conversation before I'm willing to change my mind about about something that's why I use this Socratic method a lot just to use questions and and I I also think that if someone we genuinely believe their intent is to try to do the right thing even if they've got a horrible idea instead of setting them on fire right which is the it's epidemic Crush these people blast them ridicule them make them afraid to show their face in public that type of thing I think if I am genuinely a humanist I want to see people rescued from bad ideas and I want to see myself rescued if I happen to have a bad idea as well but these required conversations Melanie tracic green over or Melanie trees at King over at thinking ispower.com set a great line on the show the other day that I've stolen I just use it all the time and she said people will not care what you believe unless they believe that you care absolutely if I show up with data points and bat somebody over the head with them I'm not going to change them but that is not how we change the world but because they won't care what I believe unless they believe that I care unless they they feel safe with me and that's a moment where conversations can begin so back to the original question of determining intent it's imperfect I do think sometimes we can see if someone's just being a jerk or they're filling a you know the void of insecurity by trying to make us you know they they're trying to knock us down to make themselves look better if they just want attention or other people who may be good people who were just indoctrinated or have bad ideas as best we can I think we still have to try to make that determination and most importantly we don't write everybody off who disagrees with uh with us and then try to wipe them off the planet right I I genuinely think we we have to we have to be able to live in a world with people who have opposing ideas without trying to set them all on fire instead I'd rather change Minds than you know commit myself to trying to wipe everybody out who's not on in my group kind of thing yeah I think we definitely need more compassion in the world today and that can open the doors to tremendous positive change with it it need that that that's an ingredient that is missing and far too many of our conversations and in our interactions yeah and I I hope that the work that that is happening now and I think I've seen an evolution of atheist activism over the last I've been doing this for 16 years 15 years um it used to be mostly just mockery and mockery has its place right I mean I go after I think there's a Liberation exercise when you take the things that were deemed sacred and untouchable and you say this no longer scares me I'm not afraid to ridicule it I think that can be a Liberation exercise especially on the larger macro stage but you know it used to be mostly it was uh pretty unfortunate language about the creatard and the religitard and all these these types of things that weren't even I mean it was just horrible horrible not even an argument it was just Superior snarking right just exactly the mere image of what you were saying at the beginning of our conversation about the uh evolutionists and uh yeah uh and and the stupid people who didn't believe in God are just bad idea bad arguments religion is a mental illness I swear if I have to hear that one more time I'm religion religious people are not mentally ill you know I just think religion is an idea I wasn't mentally ill when I was a Believer and I believed as as hard as anybody I was a hardcore Fundy believer and there's so many of those types of arguments that we used to see a lot of we're seeing less of it now and we're getting more into the psychology of belief how does the brain work what is an identity belief what triggers happen in the amygdala whenever an identity belief is confronted why the fight or flight reflex how do you get through that you know understanding how beliefs are formed and defended I think that's the ticket to changing Minds in this world world the the machine of ideas we have to understand the the inner workings the mechanisms of identity beliefs and I'm seeing more of that not enough but I am seeing more of that these days and I think that's that's a step in the right direction for sure well I I wish you all the best in uh in your continuing efforts to promote more Humanity in humanism and uh I can assure you that that's what we're going to be doing as well here at the center for inquiry Canada uh Seth Andrews uh thank you for this enlightening and fascinating conversation any uh any final thoughts to share with our audience well I think uh you know mostly on my radar these days has been trying to overcome my own sense of I don't know it's I I'm not I'm not tired I'm weary I mean does anyone else relate to that like you just wake up in the morning and you log on to the world and it's like damage report you know the rise of the Christian Nationalist and the Hostile takeover of the Supreme Court in the United States and Trump Cults and you know we've got white supremacists who are waving Nazi Flags in Florida and I you know sometimes I just become overwhelmed by it and I have to stop and will myself and re-center myself to remember that we are seeing a growing secularization of the culture especially the 30 and under crowd the the those Generations are not interested in the religious bigotry of their parents and grandparents many of them are activated secular students who are engaged and they're not interested in in taking away a woman's Reproductive Rights or condemning a gay person or or being xenophobic convicted against a foreign person you know they see us all this the we're seeing more and more of that and so one of the the reasons that these institutions are being sort of uh taken over is they're they're being attacked by the the zealots it's because the zealots realize the writing is on the wall more and more we are living in the United States that does not look like them it terrifies them but I think it should be a moment of encouragement for the rest of us we must be vigilant but I I I'm interested to see what the overall demographic of this country looks like 10 15 years from now and what fruit that might bear in the institutions all around us my hope is for a secular and perhaps more rational America if we can survive until then so that's my final thought you're here I uh the government neutrality in matters of religion is uh is one of my passion uh uh activist uh stances and I I hope to see more of it not just in Canada not just in the United States but but around the world and the the trend lines are are positive but uh that's uh it's far from uniform I think uh I think it was Martin Luther King Jr who said that the the the the Arc of the universe is long but it bends towards Justice and I I do think that there there is cause for optimism but not complacency you said that vigilance is required and I think that uh the effort your continued efforts and and those uh who share our humanist philosophies are are required to see that uh that better world in the years to come but it is it is possible I will keep activisting if you will all right I'll just keep kicking and see what happens well thank you this has been great and I hope to have the opportunity to speak with you again it's a pleasure thank you [Music] we hope you enjoyed today's episode links for today's discussion can be found in the show notes if you enjoyed today's podcast please show your support at patreon.com podcast for inquiry and give us a five star review on Apple podcasts email us podcast at Center for inquiry.ca we'd love to hear your perspective the podcast for inquiry is brought to you by the center for inquiry Canada we are a national educational charity supporting reason compassion and secular values help us support rational discourse and evidence-based decision-making by becoming a member at Center for inquiry.ca join cfic is on the web and Facebook and Twitter at CFI Canada podcast for inquiry is produced and edited by Lee Shields Zach Dumont and Martin zielinski music by Anthony Lazaro I'm your host Leslie rosenblood see you next time [Music]

Channel: Centre for Inquiry Canada

Views: 48,070

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Id: rm6-tRdu2uE

Length: 64min 42sec (3882 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2023