The Unholy Trinity Tour: Part 1 of 3 - Matt Dillahunty

[Music] [Music] for those who aren't aware I do a call-in show on public access TV out of Austin which basically means I've done a ton of informal debates but I've also done a bunch of formal debates one of them here in Amarillo two years ago against Abdul Mary who was here for that yay you liked me enough to come back so I want to tell you two a story today I guess about something happened last month I was asked to do a debate at a Church of Christ in San Antonio Texas now before I start it wasn't a debate it was four days of debate and when they first told me that I was like oh hell no first of all you can't afford to pay me for four days go on charge you double but it's in a in double nothing is that's still nothing but I I was raised primarily Southern Baptist and what I can tell you is that I knew very very little about church Christ I don't know I don't know if anybody here might be Church of Christ but I learned a lot and there's some stuff I want to share I want to talk a little bit about that weekend but one of the things is that I'm going to be addressing this particular search is doctrine and inevitably somebody's going to say ah yeah you know it's unbeliever out there is like oh yeah he's against that kind of religion no I'm against yours too that's a guarantee but when we first walked in my wife likes to collect the little pamphlets and flyers that you find maybe at roadside stops and rest areas and hotels and whatever you know not quite Chick tracts but close and the first one she picked up was why the Church of Christ is not a cult and she immediately like went to Facebook and she's like if you have to produce a pamphlet and as a Southern Baptist even though I didn't know too much about them I probably would have thought that they were a cult or cult like are they occult yeah and the big sense that all religions are called cults and and primarily cult is what the big religions call the little religions but in a real sense about removing people from their families and ostracizing them becoming separate they're less cult-like than some of the others they just have some very specific doctrines very very very specific and narrow you walk into a Church of Christ there's no cross there's no stained glass there are no musical instruments now the funny thing is the church Christ they of course think that well of course you're an atheist you believe the false religion the Baptist the Episcopalians and Presbyterians the catholics they're all going to look at the Church of Christ and say well you guys kind of got it a little bit wrong and the Church of Christ is going to look at every other religion go nope yours guy you're all false religions it's no wonder that this produced an atheist it's strange though they didn't have a real good explanation for why Tracy Harris my co-host on the TV show one of my co-hosts was also Church Christ so she was into religion maybe the false version of the true religion I don't know this is the problem of having multiple views covered by a single label with everybody pointing back to the same holy book there was a whole lot of things that went on this weekend more than I could ever possibly get to because it was four days and just as an experiment irregardless nucular the way some of you feel right now is the way I felt the whole weekend they made a point of let me know that among their doctrines they don't believe the Holy Spirit moves and works through people anymore and they don't believe in miracles that miracles don't happen anymore miracles existed only during that old time in order to prove the word and now we've got the word so we don't need miracles and so apologists and many different Christian denominations have been wrestling with and coming up with all these reasons how come and why is it that you know the events that we called miracles seem to be documented pretty well and and reported at a wide rate throughout the Bible and then they start declining kind of in conjunction with our ability to understand the universe and so the church Christ has got that beat because those things don't happen anymore God stop doing that they've solved a lot of the problems like Mark 16 9 through 20 the last of the last few verses in the last book of Mark which doesn't exist in the oldest and best manuscripts and includes not only the Great Commission but the claim that you will know them as they cast out demons and as they handle serpents and no harmful thing and direct poisons etc so Church Christ doesn't really have a problem with this I mean I'm told I look a lot like the pastor in Kentucky who just died from handling snakes I have snakes mine aren't poisonous so it's a but they they don't have to deal with any of that the the conference was four days and they were shocked that I was there all four days all day long listening to preacher after preacher after preacher they had the lecture notes for all of the speakers printed inbound before the event started and I have a copy that they gave me and it's full of notes they were shocked I was taking notes who is this guy we just brought him into a debate and he's paying attention and and it's a good thing too because the very first talk on the very first day is the very first one in the book very first lines for every house is built it by some man but he that built all things is God Hebrews three for this eternal principle has never been proven wrong right out of the game we're shifting the burden of proof hasn't been proven wrong yeah hadn't been proven true either maybe we ought to wait to believe it until after it has conference over I could have made this so much shorter they had a number of problems with with me over the course of the weekend we all got along maybe not so much afterwards biggest problem they had was that during these debates they would ask me questions and I would say I don't know that made a mad we brought Matt over here and every time we ask him a question it's I don't know I don't know if that's the answer that's the answer what is your problem with I don't know why would you want me to get up here and pretend to know things that I don't know the way you are the pastor of the church sorry preacher they're not pastors in Church of Christ they're preachers and he corrected me on that about 12 times pulled me aside on the third day Oh third day lots of illusions coming and said are you really going to be comfortable going to your deathbed not knowing and I looked in the eye and said what choice do I have if I don't know I don't know that's not a good reason to just take whatever proposed explanation somebody has happen to toss up that hasn't been proved wrong yet I want to know things I want to know as many true things as few false things as possible and you have to have both components to that to have a proper understanding of reality he was not impressed in addition I don't know they had a product they had a number of other problems I'm going to get through some of these words words have meanings this is a big thing for them oh no this word means this this word means this words have meaning words have no they don't words do not have intrinsic meanings words have usages the actual jumble of letters that we put together doesn't have some intrinsic meaning the phonemes that we speak doesn't have some intrinsic magical meaning that's why languages change over time and they were so stuck on this idea of words having meanings that one of the very first talks was objecting to Lawrence Krauss everybody familiar with the business isn't okay great the universe from nothing which word do you think they had the most problem with nothing and here's what's sad if you have a problem with the way somebody is using a word what I would do is say okay clearly we're using this word in two different ways or maybe we have two different concepts let's go ahead and define what we're talking about and use that and use it fairly and we'll talk about it on your terms but instead what they did was said when Lawrence Krauss says nothing he doesn't mean nothing he means something and then they responded to his argument Lawrence Krauss argument by inserting the nothing that they know he doesn't mean and then trying to show that this is silly well of course it doesn't work that way if you're going to build a damn straw man out of it if you if somebody's making an argument and they use butter butter is tasty and to you butter means poop and you say Matt's using the word butter wrong and butter actually means poop and he's starting to tell you that poop is tasty how dishonest is that if the concept that one person is talking about is not remotely being addressed by another and when they flat asked me you know what does it do don't words have intrinsic meetings and I was like no and it was you could see them they were all like words don't have meanings you know the sky is falling this is terrible whatever we're going to it's about the context in which it's used and it's about the concept that you're trying to convey and if you can't honestly argue the actual concept that your opponent is presenting in a debate you have no business debating at all ever just like Ray Comfort I'll never debate ray again we were asked to do a debate on public great or a Christian radio station in Minneapolis st. Paul and Ray showed up and flatly said that he had no interest in proving that God exists to anybody but he was desperately concerned about my soul and loved me and I was you know destined for hell etc and so my closing remarks with it he should stop accepting debates and I'll keep saying that over and over and over again as long as there's a camera in front of me ray you'd stop debating so there's a lot of other things that went on this weekend the first night was basically a debate they didn't call a debate they wanted to call it a dialectical discussion because debate carries some baggage you know because words mean things and the word debate has this meaning that they didn't particularly like and in the course of this it was preacher after preacher after preacher all day Friday Saturday Sunday and Fridays dialectical discussion was basically about whether or not God exists as a universe more reasonable to be created than not created or something along those lines the second evening was whether or not God is a man-made and the third evening was about morality now by the time we got to the third evening which was the last of the debates on the fourth day I just did a quick presentation and didn't actually do a debate so I would sit there all day listening to preacher after preach after preacher preacher taking lots and lots of notes occasionally tweeting which they did not like and I would do the debate and the first night was kind of a mess that's where we started into these problems about words having meanings so where we started running into this problem of I don't know and it's also where we really started to hit on the anti science now I have no problem with ignorance ignorance can be fixed with education that's the whole purpose of what I do is what Horan does what Seth does is what teachers do that's the whole purpose I hate willful ignorance and more than that I despise the joyous celebration of willful ignorance and encouraging other people to stay ignorant which was what was on parade all weekend they couched it in terms of hey we're not anti science as long as it agrees with us the exact same thing that Aaron was talking about over and over again they kept saying hey we're not like those other Christians we don't believe in miracles the miracles are done you know that happen the Pat telling me you don't believe in miracles now doesn't really convince me that you are a rational human being because now what you're saying is I don't believe there's actual miracles going on now that I could investigate or perhaps find some information about but I believe these unsourced anonymous unconfirmed bolt ales of miracles from long ago now I know which one seems more reasonable to me but to them the fact that they don't believe that miracles are occurring is great several times one of the preachers came up to tell me hey we I don't know what you think about Church Christ but we don't believe in ghosts well good for you now get rid of that other stuff that you believe too it's not special and while I'm picking on the Church of Christ folks they're going to be as I mentioned earlier people from other religions saying oh yeah yeah it wait because Church of Christ they're young earth in a big way this is where the anti science started they don't the other churches say hey we're not like them we don't believe in a young earth but when you believe those same unsourced unconformity miracle stories because you have to if you disregard all that you're done you don't have any religion left there's no Savior no resurrection no bread and fishes and loaves and walking on water now I'm not saying you necessarily have to believe all that each denomination is going to disagree on every single point of doctrine but this anti-science celebration of willful ignorance got to the point where it was more than I could bear my wife went with me on Saturday and I had claw marks in my wrist from where she would reach over and grab every time they'd say something because they would get up and not just be anti-science while pretending that they were pro they would mock scientists with their letter fancy letters after their last name trying to be all elitist and making us think that we're not on their level you're not doesn't mean they're right and you're wrong we can talk about the facts and determine it later but it is a fact you are not on their level these are people who spent their entire lives studying something that was built by people who spent their entire life studying something which was built on things that other people study for their entire lives on back doesn't mean that they're going to be right and that everything they say is right that's an argument from Authority that's a fallacy I get that but if your objection is that they're all elitist because you're not on their level and meanwhile you're talking about talking snakes and a literal 6,000 year old earth you are not on their level that's just if and I told him that on Sunday they were not happy about that either but there was this parade of preachers getting up saying I don't really understand science but let me tell you why they're wrong it's printed right here in the book that they gave me one of the lectures starts off with I've tried and tried to understand evolution and I just can't wrap my mind around it so I went and talked to some of my preacher friends who seem to have a better understanding of it than me and this is what they told me to say man if only science were done that way fortunately it's not this one's just mean on my part and they didn't like it much that I did this but I'm not mentioned his name because I don't remember one of them was up there talking about what was going on and and and and people appealing to God and I don't remember the exact context of this but he said seventy-three percent of all accidents involving falling objects are caused by gravity I thought it was honored but 94 percent of all statistics are pulled out of your butt right when you need them and that's one of them they objected because science is unreliable because it changes yes and what exactly is it the change of science oh yeah more science they have it in their head that science is telling them truths but science doesn't make any claim to truth or absolute truth science builds theories and models that are the best current explanation for the facts that we observe in the universe and it follows the evidence where it leads instead of leading the evidence towards your pre-drawn conclusion they don't understand in their young earth mentality which they went over and over and over again before I went I asked Tracy I was like is young earth creation isn't going to be a big deal well it's not really a tentative you know the salvation but yeah they're young earthers and I don't know how much they're gonna bring it up oh it was everywhere I had a physicist to come in not to talk about the age of the earth but I asked him because I was dumbfounded he's got PhD in physics hasn't done physics since the 70s I wish you'd get back to it and I said okay all these other folks here they're they're young earthers to come on you've got a PhD in physics give me an age maybe twenty thousand years are you kidding me and I tried to explain to them that in order for the world to be as young as you think it is it's not just oh we found some outliers in some radiometric dating so I'm not going to believe what those fancy scientists are saying you don't understand the dating methods at all you don't understand how the overlap how they prove we're so good at knowing how that these things work that we can tell exactly how reliable they are you know we have an error error bar for each of these assessments but if the world doesn't work this way you have no MRIs the same physics that control radioactive decay that allows us to a to date certain things is used in medical science which you guys accept that's the science that you're Pro and this one that disagrees with your holy book is the one that you're against and the reason for that is they have one and only one Authority and this goes back to what our was saying and that is the New Testament and during the discussions I asked lots and lots of difficult questions about how do you know this is reliable and those are you seeing the show I've used my alien abduction scenario thing about you know there's people living right here right now that you can talk to who will tell you their alien abduction scenario not not any more outlandish than miracles in the Bible and they're their stories or seem kind of consistent yet you don't believe them why not and instead of believing them you're going to believe the tales from anonymous authors who most likely weren't eyewitnesses and even if they were we know eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable and these people were trying to sell something a religion stories had become legends and you're going to believe those yes and I was told because they asked me you know do you trust and I may have misspoken during this thing because they heard me say that I don't trust anyone and what I remember saying was something more along the lines of I'm not going to trust anyone when it comes to things like these that the mere fact that somebody tells me that they witnessed someone rock crop rise from from the dead is in and of itself not sufficient to believing that it's true Hume taught us to evaluate these things by asking whether it's more likely that the individual is deceived or attempting to deceive than that the event actually happened and to reject the greater miracle and so while I'm happy to take your word for me when you tell me you have a pet dog I'm not happy to take your word when you tell me you have the pet invisible dragon story they literally told me that if you find the gospel authors credible in other areas then you have to take their word for the extraordinary areas as well every con artist and grifter jiz doubled over and laughter as soon as they said that because that is the definition of gullibility to trust someone implicitly because they've been truthful or accurate to the best of your ability to find out in some other area I don't normally talk about my family my mom but my mom are only a letter once she's not Church of Christ but she said honey I just want to let you know there is a Jesus your mom wouldn't lie to you and they don't see the problem I don't think my mom's lying to me I think she's not actually saying what it is true the truth is she believes there's a Jesus and so she's relaying that information to me as honestly she can but she's portraying it as if it's a fact in and of itself I tried to talk to him about extraordinary claims and how they require extraordinary evidence and how you need to set up a burden of proof that if you believe something until it's proven wrong you're going to be forced to believe many competing and contradictory things and instead if you wait and reserve belief until such time as belief is actually deserved and warranted by the evidence you're going to be on much more solid footing the third night we went about morality because eventually all debates become about morality and I just went with slavery it's and they laughed you know because somebody had said oh I hear this is your go-to argument you know slavery yeah yeah it is it's a go-to argument because the Bible is really really clear about it and nobody agrees with what the Bible actually says about it I went through some of the passages brought up my objections to slavery and boy the apologetics that I got were amazing hi people I'll say hi to you people well I think that God was giving those instructions about slavery and how you can only beat them a little bit so that eventually we would understand that slavery was wrong get rid of it God was kind of doing a soft play way of getting rid of slavery know if you're God you can just say don't have slaves if it's easy enough for God to say don't murder people don't lie don't covet your neighbors why was it so damn hard to say thou shalt not own another human being as brought human being his property what kind of weak ask God do you have that he's got a well y'all keeping slaves I'm don't beat him too bad then it was claimed that I misunderstood or misrepresented the scripture well that was a mistake because then I read it if your opponent gets a chance is going to be able to speak after you're done and you say that they misrepresent something you better be right and then they came back and said well the Bible correctly understood means this and by way of an example I talked about there's a passage where during the the plagues and God is trying to get his people free and the favor will keep saying okay I give up I'll let you go and then it says literally God hardened Pharaoh's heart and they said no God didn't actually do that he just allowed favor to harden his own heart well in the first before that it says Pharaoh was ready go ahead and take your people get out I'm scared terrified you win and then it literally says God hardened Pharaoh's heart and I said so what you're telling me is the literal reading of God hardened Pharaoh's heart correctly understood means God didn't harden Pharaoh's heart maybe we should be murdering people thou shalt kill I mean if we can actually reverse something and have it be correctly interpreted at that point is anything out of Bounce well then they came back and said well the slavery was actually for the good of these slaves you see these were prisoners and we've got we've got to get them to know God so it was good for them to be prisoners and they likened it to incarceration all the audio is is out on their internet it was a mess and I pointed out to them and this seemed to sink in on Sunday night that if you're going to point to the Bible as the good book which is not if you're going to point to it as your moral guide book I can write a more moral book than the Bible I can write a better moral guide than the Bible and I'm saying this from their pulpit in their church and I can prove it to everybody here right now because I could rewrite the Bible word-for-word and change the the allowance of slavery to a prohibition of slavery and the book would already be better we could do a lot more than that that's what the rest of us who aren't beholden to one book have been doing so what were the results from this particular weekend from hell I had a conversation with the pastor after it was over with and he wanted to give me some vais about how to not be condescending which I'm happy to take I am I am NOT so I am occasionally arrogant I am occasionally crude and name-calling and angry and hang up on people and do all kinds of stuff nobody's perfect I'm pretty close but nobody's perfect but there were other emails from people in the congregation and I won't claim that I destroyed this church I'm sure the church is fine but as I was driving home the thought the passage about pitting brother against brother and coming to sow destruction right through my head because what we heard on Monday is that people in the church have been going to the elders to say why'd you bring this guy down here he's been making better points than our guy and on Monday morning when I wasn't originally supposed to be there but I came down anyway the speaker's got up and they were like there are some people who think that Matt made better points this weekend and we just like to remind you that this is about engaging in conversation and opening your mind and considering things it's not an adversarial process with a winner and a loser and then the person that I debated got up and from the pulpit chastised the congregation and the elders and his brother for saying that it wasn't an adversarial process with a debater with a winner and a loser and how dare they remotely suggest that Matt made better arguments than he did and then his brother who's the main preacher got up and said now I know hang on this doesn't have to be have it so I've got these in the church on Monday morning I also had people from the church emailing me asking me for advice when I was asking for advice about sex fortune I loved because we didn't talk about that all weekend and what that shows is that there was a little breakthrough there was a point where this person who is in this rigid structure to church with one and only one authority was willing for a moment to step out and seek some other authority and that's how falling away from religion happens it happens in little bitty steps the takeaway from all this is don't buy into the idea that debates and conversations are pointless they can't reason somebody out of something that they weren't reasoned into because they were in fact reasoned into it just with really bad reasons oh you can't talk to these people they're thick you can't talk to these people they're silly they believe stuff they're never going to give it up some of them may not some of them me everywhere I go every lecture I give there are people who come up and say thank you so much what you guys have done on your show helped change my life I used to be a believer I used to be an agnostic I used to not be a skeptic any number of things when I was here two years ago for the debate with Abdul Mary I got an email shortly after from a young person 13 at the time who let me know that her parents had exposed or do a bunch of different positions and you know allowing to make up their own mind and that after that debate she now identified as an atheist we're reaching people it's all possible the nuns of the fastest-growing religious group although how much of a group we are is up for debate that there is it's not futile as my friend Keith Lal Jensen comedian has people raise their hands how many of you were ever religious raise your hand and how many of you were benefitted from people arguing and debating about religion in order to get you out I think we were worth talking to that's Keith's line Keith thinks we were we're talking - I do - which is why I do this I used to joke that I did it for penance I don't I do it because I want to change the world I do it because this stuff matters I do it because that church in San Antonio has a group of people who are being intentionally misled and I don't mean that the individuals are lying in the sense that they don't believe what they're saying they do but they've begun with presuppositions about the one and only Authority being the New Testament anything that doesn't agree with it gets thrown out and his arm pointed out that's still the lie and if they're teaching their kids this even if their kids are getting a good education they're undermining it and I care about what kind of world I leave behind why would you care about that you're going to be dead it doesn't matter because I do because people who came before me cared about what kind of world they left behind I benefited from Hume and Voltaire and Robert Granger Saul and I want other people to have even more access to information so that we don't have to maybe maybe in 50 hundred two hundred years this will be nonsense nobody will come down and hear this stuff nobody will go out and have arguments because we'll be done with it yeah religion is never going to entirely go away but if we can get at a point where it cannot influence our lives where religion is PZ Myers likened it to knitting you know as a hobby when when not just the young Arthur's and the flat earthers are scoffed and mocked but anybody who's advocating the supernatural which doesn't have evidence for are ostracized I don't want them to necessarily be excluded I want their ideas excluded which encourages them to come along with the rest of us to the future because the future is amazingly promising as long as we don't screw it up and the one thing that's most likely going to make us screw it up is irrational thinking rooted in superstition and religion and I'll keep debating until it kills me thank you you you

Channel: TheThinkingAtheist

Views: 93,186

Rating: 4.9243207 out of 5

Keywords: Matt Dillahunty (Broadcast Artist), atheist, atheism, The Thinking Atheist, Seth Andrews, AronRa, Unholy Trinity, The Unholy Trinity Tour, secular, religion

Id: SBwv79WFqAc

Length: 34min 18sec (2058 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 05 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/metalfish]

When will part 2 and 3 be out? Thanks

[u/NickyJroy]

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