Theistic Reasoning: Fallacies and Faith by Matt Dillahunty at Reason in the Rock 2013

so before I actually get started yeah there are no slides so you can look at the pretty birds until they go away there's something I want to address earlier this morning somebody asked a question about Arkansas having a law on the books that you couldn't run for office if you didn't believe in God and Texas and other states have that that doesn't matter anymore that doesn't it does it yes they still exist on the books and they will forever even if we created an amendment to your state constitution it'll still say that it would just be an amendment that corrects and amends it well we have now the correction amendment corrects and amends it are at least two Supreme Court rulings starting with Emerson versus Board of Education in 1947 where they ruled that the government can't force anybody to worship or participate in religious services or identity at all and then Turco Sophie Watkins in 1961 was about a notary public who ran fur off notary public in Maryland and they tried to say you couldn't do this because you're an atheist in our Constitution prohibits it and went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said hey what about that no religious test for public office and so yeah run run your little asses off for everything you can run for and if they challenge you on it as they did with herb Silverman they're going to lose and it's going to look bad it's going to inform more people about what the law actually is so um raise your hands okay so so that little pause in the discomfort that some of you felt because you expected there to be an if coming immediately following that that's how you're conditioned to think that's how we're all conditioned to think you're right there wasn't if coming or there should have been and I may not be the world's greatest actor but I at least tried to say it in the way that implied that there was an if coming and I'll get to the actual question in a second but I wanted people to think about how they're conditioned to respond to things because we like to think that we engage in reason all the time and the title of the talk today is theistic reasoning fallacies and faith I don't know if that title actually fits but I guess I'll make it trying try to fit so thinking is costly and risky it's time-consuming and so we tend to live our lives by taking all kinds of shortcuts we use reason we appeal to evidence in order to basically teach our gut how to make better decisions on the fly we live our lives by inference and induction primarily yesterday and today are pretty much the same the things we're going to encounter the people we're going to meet the things we're going to see they don't change much they change a little bit you know we do live in a dynamic universe but it helps us make accurate predictions so the question I should have asked raise your hands if you used to be religious of some type now raise your hand if you know exactly what it is that changed your mind not quite as many hands I don't know what changed my mind I was a funnel - Christian for more than 25 years it was studying to be with the goal of being a minister my roommate at the time was an atheist I won't go through my whole life story but I decided that I didn't want to see him in Hell so I better figure out how to convince an atheist and so I started investigating all kinds of stuff and the man who just snuck into the room and doesn't think anybody saw him yet hey Dan so Dan Barker might be the one reason and if there was one reason it might be Dan or it might be the content of infidels org or it might be David Hume or Voltaire I don't know I can't pin it down to one thing and I don't know that too many people can and I don't nail that it's necessarily the case that it is ever any one thing for some people there may be some epiphany some moment of I just can't believe this anymore and one of the things that atheists often get criticized for is or I have and others have is this claim that well y'all just want to sin and and we're quick to say no I'm sorry that's not actually it we actually have reasoned arguments we've thought about this we've considered it it's not just that we want to sin screw that it's okay to not believe if you just want to sin it really is and what I mean by that is religions tell people to divorce themselves from who they are who you are as human beings oh you can't be gay screw you if I'm gay I'm gay if you want to call it sinning and you don't think that's a good enough reason for me to stop believing and your God who you think made me and now I'm this way and it's nothing I can do about it or you want to call it a choice or whatever else it doesn't matter now hopefully we come to better arguments and better reasons and justify our positions better later on but the number of people who actually do stop believing because they want to quote sin is probably pretty high and they're all right to do it I don't know what the reason was but there's something there's a friend of mine here in the audience too it's probably going to roll her eyes in moment how many people have heard that saying you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into to begin with I don't believe that for a second and I have some clarifications on that number one I think every position you hold is one that you were reasoned into now maybe very bad reasoning that got you there but when you believe something that's a conclusion it's the result of becoming convinced that the proposition is true or likely to be true you didn't just uh today I'm going to believe this it just doesn't quite work that way you believe something because you've been convinced and you're always convinced by reasons now it may not be ironclad reasons they could be incredibly poor reasons but my path out and Maul most everybody's path that I've talked to they were reasoned out of it all those people who raised their hands when they said that they used to be religious maybe they gave it up because they wanted to send good for you but that's still a reason it's a logical process hey wait a minute I have these urges I have these desires this is who I am this religion says that Who I am is wrong or broken that's a reductio ad absurdum right there you've reasoned yourself out of it now it is the motivation correct we don't know depends on what you're talking about there's a lot of talk about this argument from Authority and oftentimes you know we talk about the fallacy of appealing to authorities which by the way is only fallacious if you're appealing to someone who's not actually an authority in the subject as Jason pointed out the ultimate authority when it comes to science is the data so you know you can appeal to that all day long but if you're actually citing experts in an area that's fine as long as you acknowledge they can be wrong but we're trained from the very GetGo to rely on authorities because it's cost-effective it's an easy way you listen to your parents why well they managed to make it through and not die so odds are the information that they have to give you is probably pretty good and most of the time it is we live our lives primarily by inference and induction we rely on authorities because most of the time it works and unfortunately some of the time it really doesn't work and it causes massive harm I'm hoping that there's actually time for questions at the end of this but they stuck me right before dinner and I've never said anything briefly in my life and I don't want to hold up dinner but it's an efficient way to learn oh here's an authority I got it here's authority I got it here's an authority I got it and it works most of the time and the best thing that we can do is realize that it only works most of the time and that you have this duty if you care about the truth if you care about as I've said many times I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible that means that I must have some mechanism to distinguish between the two and if I don't the default position is to not accept whatever it is that they're claiming what Phil was up earlier was talking about that people trying to sell you things and you got to make your decision today they are relying on exploiting that part of your brain and religion does the same thing what if you died tonight do you know where you'd spend eternity yeah I wouldn't spend eternity anywhere if I died tonight I'm pretty much dead so this this idea that you can't reason somebody out of something is really an admission that it's very difficult and that the reasons people believe things are varied and the paths out of those things are varied now when I first started identifying as an atheist there's a long time before my parents knew they lived in Missouri I lived in Texas well they lived in Texas for a while too but I was doing a TV show writing for online magazines just all using my real name not the slightest bit concerned about ever being outed and I was sitting at work one day and a phone rang and it was my uncle and my uncle used to be a medical missionary and he was at that time he was just a doctor in Dallas and he said hey I was googling my name and I happen to stumble across some stuff about you that has me very concerned now I'm 44 right now this was a little around 10 years ago or so maybe no it's got to be more in ten years I've been doing the show for almost eight anyway I I'm a grown-up and what my uncle says to me is that he's concerned and that I need to tell my father or he's going to go do it for me cuz my dad needs to know that his sons not only going to hell but evidently leading people to hell by the droves I was dumbfounded and it was actually the call that I was most looking forward to and dreading because I'd spent a lot of time studying this stuff and I'd already been engaged in arguments and but I hadn't run up against anybody who I knew to be really smart and really spiritually wise the guy was a medical doctor he's retired now or retiring it was a medical missionary he was throughout my entire life the only person in my family who went to college and graduate school he was the pinnacle he was my grandmother's favorite which explains some other stuff I won't go into but he was her favorite and he was the spiritual leader of the entire family because he's a missionary and I thought wow this is going to be the big test because either today I'm going back to Jesus because he's got the magic bullet or I'm set and a kid you not Pascal's wager what if you're wrong arguments from ignorance well if God didn't do this who did never mind that the who is already a problem you know if you're going to be worried about phrasing questions and that was it that was the extent of it it was not very difficult to actually work my way through that and so I spent years doing the TV show we get calls all the time how many people are familiar with the show just China roughly cool if you haven't there's clips all over YouTube and stuff like that we take live calls there used to be a lot more theistic callers than there are now now we get a lot of atheists actually I've kind of turned into the Dear Abby of atheism because and it's something that's needed because there's a lot of people who are out there they're in really difficult situations I have 5600 unread emails in my inbox after archiving 4,000 of them here recently and there are a lot of lot of repeated questions hey I'm in a relationship and I've stopped believing what do I do now we came into this both of us as Christians and now we've got kids and I don't believe anymore or I'm a non-believer dating a believer what it's like a lot of dating and married marriage advice and advice about raising kids now I'm really concerned now because what do we allow our to be our kids to be taught you know she wants them to go to this Christian school and I don't he wants them to go to this to home school where they've got the young Earth Creationism textbook and that really bothers me and I don't know I don't have kids I have some advice that I tend to give and by and large I think it's reasonable I think it tends to work out I hear from a lot of teenagers I don't believe anymore and my parents do what the hell do I do oh they're making me go to church they're forcing me to go to church they're going to take away my college fund well first of all my advice in that go to church go and take lots of notes and ask lots of lots of questions because first of all they'll prepare you for discussions that you have later on because you're never for the rest of your life going to get away from having to talk to people who'd believe things that you don't believe unless you get really rich and buy an island somewhere but not only that but if you take lots of notes and ask lots of questions they might stop making you go because it just becomes a little bit of a nuisance you know I don't know exactly what we can do anymore okay you can stop going to church as long as you quit asking us questions and so I started doing more and more public debates I did a debate in San Marcos a couple weeks ago which hasn't been posted yet it was it was interesting in that it was a rematch debate kind of against somebody whose entire argument no matter what the subject is is you can't have meaning and purpose in life without God he would just repeat that over and over again that's what his entire two hours one time in two hours another time that was it over and over and over again and when there was a directed cue a back and forth he'd look at me and say Matt how do you know that you're meaning and purpose is true and I'd try to explain why that was one of the dumbest questions I've ever heard and he's literally as soon as I was done answering looked at me as if it was the best gotcha in the world and asked the exact same question word-for-word oh you didn't answer me yes because your question presumes things is why don't you just ask me when did I stop beating my wife oh I did no I never started that's not an answer my question and you've got Oprah who's as referenced earlier talking about a II theist can't appreciate all and meaning there's a theistic mindset it doesn't matter where you come from which religion you're in these as far as I can tell our flaws in the way we reason there are aspects of our brain that certain religious memes have taken advantage of and they're not all equally harmful and they're not all equally valuable to people there are plenty of people who do the spiritual but not religious which drives me frickin nuts because spiritual and spirituality as far as I'm concerned are completely useless terms that because they can mean anything to anybody they mean nothing to no one and so people ask all the time well you know you've been doing the show I want to get into these debates how do I do these arguments and you're you know how do I spot these fallacies and I think that's what some people maybe anticipated with the title of fallacies and faith and I'm going to actually pull an end-around on that because I don't think it matters yes it's cool and it's interesting and it's valuable if you're going to do big public debates at some point it's great to know about logical syllogisms and the forms and structures of arguments and which fallacies are related to form and which fallacies are related actual content the difference between validity and soundness that how to identify you know circular reasoning and all these things in structured syllogistic forms but for 99% of the population it won't matter at all because I'll tell you and and Dan's done a lot of debates and I bet Dan could probably back this up to the number of opponents in formal structured debates who have actually put forth a formally structured argument is virtually zero it is almost all conversational some of them Craig will occasionally come up with Kalam cosmological argument and have it have it out but he even he delivers it conversationally and that's where you've got to learn how to interact how that's where you got to be able to spot the fallacies is in the muddied language that we use which is there specifically to disguise the flaws the conversations that you have with people where they make these arguments that sound reasonable and you can't spot the fallacy in it right off the bat because it's not structured in any way where it's easy to find the fallacy I can't teach that in 20 minutes from up here and I'm not necessarily the best added or the best person to try and teach it it is a lifelong effort to just keep hearing as many arguments as possible and dissecting them as as best you can and to rely on lots and lots of other people who have done this work for years there's I wish I wish I could actually teach that that would be awesome I wish I wish I was about ten times better at it I wish everybody who I've seen debate was better at it because one of the things that happened early on was I was planning on writing a book for my parents I wanted to be I want to be able to explain to them why I no longer believed in a way that they could understand and I was naively convinced that I might even be able to structure some sort of magical bullet argument that might fix the whole damn world but the point was that I wanted to be able to explain to my parents and in a way that they could understand in my case that's probably not possible my parents and I release reached a new normal things will never be the old normal again they are of course I had a grieving disappointed it's it's a really odd state of affairs where they love me they think I'm probably generally a good person but I'm also working for Satan and leading people to hell meanwhile my wife's family thinks I am Satan so and the pay for being Satan or working for Satan doesn't seem to be particularly good but it became obvious that I wasn't going to get around to actually doing that my parents I was outed by my uncle as I said and my parents and I had the conversations that I was planning on doing by book which I realized was a little bit cowardly too it's not like I would have just finished a book and said okay I'm an atheist here you go because that I don't think would have gone over very well at all but I changed my mind based on reason and evidence I was reasoned out of things that I was reasoned in two good reasons Trump the bad reasons now my friend Keith Lowell Jensen who's an amazing comedian has this thing that he does which is similar to what I started with was how many people in here used to be religious and how many of you have given it up because somebody cared enough to actually talk to you about this and raise the subject and the answer that his the follow up that he gives is I think we were worth it because what people would like you to think when they say you can't reason somebody out is that oh that's futile these people aren't actually worth it these Christ cards or fundamentalists or whatever they're not worth talking to you're never gonna change their mind that's a lie that I would have said was straight from the pit of hell if I believed there was such a place you change their mind I did I'm sure there's a lot of other former fundamentalists in here and I'm with Keith I think we were worth talking to I think we were worth arguing with and I think there's a lot of other people out there who are as well last week on the show oh I'm going to back up just half a second um one of the things well I'll get to that at the end I'll leave it as a teaser so last week on the show there was a guy who called in who I have a little screen off to the side says who they are and what they're calling about and the screen said is Matt and open-minded skeptic now that's code uh the only people who asked the question are you an open-minded skeptic are the conspiracy theory nuts who are disappointed that their particular little woo thing that they accept has not achieved scientific recognition and credibility its are you and it usually it's about like DMT or 9/11 or whatever and this time it was about miracle workers and and they asked a question about miracle workers being able to heal me and you know what would I do in these various situations and there was this miracle man who can heal people and he's planning a trip to Africa to investigate it himself and I said why do you have some relevant expertise in investigating this sort of thing and even if you did what exactly is it that you hope to prove you're going to go there and you're going to talk to this person you're going to see what they do and at best at best you will be able to confirm that some phenomenon took place but you don't have an explanation for it is there something about your trip that is going to give you the causal explanation for what you may or may not witness what what reason do you have to think that that's going to happen what reason do you think that your trips gonna be productive why what are you planning on getting out of this and why would you do it if you already believe and in the face of all these questions he did what any good believer would do and he flatly said well I would just accept it on faith who's the open-minded skeptic now well what does that have to do with skepticism I'm an open-minded skeptic so I'm going to take things on faith yeah the word faith has all kinds of different definitions and usages out how much time I have 15 go I have a particular definition that I've switched to from what I used to use and that is that faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don't have a good reason because if you have good reason you don't need faith when you look at the biblical definition faith is the evidence of things hope for faith isn't evidence that's basically an admission that faith is the assertion that you know this thing is real and it's a evidence of things hope for and something about substance of things unseen yeah and you know what you know why they put the unseen in there because since you see it you have frickin evidence and you don't need faith anymore now when I run into religious people quite often they're starting to use a particular definition of faith and they use it specifically so they can accuse all of us of using faith to to them faith is believing something if you don't have a reason to be absolutely certain about it well that's nonsense there are there's almost nothing that we're absolutely certain about we believe all kinds of things for really really really good reasons and we don't care about absolute certainty absolute certainty is a red herring almost all the time but if they can get you to say well you know I've got faith in this then all of a sudden they can commit an equivocation fallacy and claim that their faith and your faith are equal oh so now we're both unjustified this is about the best excuse you can come up with a response you come up with there no I don't have any use for faith I don't have any use for the word faith and a whole bunch of other words - I have used for some other F words though there's a number of people number different categories of people that we might be able to interact with we might be able to reach there are people who haven't yet questioned their beliefs but they will and hasn't occurred to them that they can question I get email all the time you know you you know you do TV show and you're able to talk about these things things and you know so much how on earth did you stay Christian for 25 plus years it didn't really occur to me to question I was a skeptic long before I was an atheist I was skeptical about everything except for my religious beliefs because if you're surrounded by a whole bunch of people who believe all the same crap that you do I mean people say I have asked me before well you know did you ever experience the Holy Spirit while you were Christian no but I believed I did at the time so you know if you want to take that as a yes well what exactly are you talking about well you're singing you're engaged in worship you feel a sense of euphoria goosebumps elation undescribable it's just awesome and everybody around you says I felt that too and that's the Holy Spirit and so that becomes your answer there's no justification for it there's no connection between hey I experienced this and this is the explanation for it it's just asserted and it's accepted by everybody around you and so you accept it too and it becomes as far as you're concerned the truth that's how we operate that's how our brains work hey mom and dad said the fires hot and it would burn and they said this funny feeling is the Holy Spirit or an orgasm because that's what helped me figure this out I've had similar experiences to the Holy Spirit from secular music that I shouldn't have been listening to art music other you know not just like rock and roll and stuff but additional music I was going to say good music but I love rock and roll - I've is drugs sex all of those things produce slightly different versions of the same thing as far as I'm concerned well does that mean that your experiences with the Holy Spirit were false No something you can't just just you can't always disprove something but I have no good reason to think it was actually the Holy Spirit but I have a good reason to think is that this is the way your brain works and that religion is probably tapped into something that we experience normally because it's not just Christianity that experiences this watch those tribal religions and gathering around there's something about community and interactions and connecting with other people and I'm personally betting that it has something to do with mirror neurons and serotonin levels but I don't know crap about science so I'm just making up stuff that's okay because Deepak Chopra does it every day in addition to people who haven't questioned yet but we'll there are people who have questioned and won't ever question again because they saw something in them and in the world that terrified them I don't know if those people have any hope of being reached the thing is I can't necessarily tell the difference between the two so I'm talking to both of them there's people who understand epistemology sound evidence evidence standards and people who don't the solution to that is more education who do we reach out to Sam Harris had previously said that liberal and moderate theists are part of the problem because they're basically using the same label and pointing the same holy book and I completely agree but whose reachable I'm personally the opinion that fundamentalists and literalists are probably one of the most reachable subsets of the theistic communities that are out there and this is where I'll disagree with something was said earlier evolution was most definitely in conflict with the religion that I believed in those two simply aren't compatible and that's true for a great many religions and a great many Sciences does that mean science and religion are irreconcilable no what it does mean is that if you're a fundamentalist in your literalist and somebody comes to tell you hey you don't have to give up your religion to accept scientific facts about the universe they're wrong because that fundamentalist literalist tradition is in direct conflict with what science knows about the universe and that's why they're vulnerable that's one of the many reasons they're vulnerable the liberal and moderate theologians are believers not all right the sophisticated theologian stuff is kind of crap really what it means is they've figured out ways to rationalize their beliefs they've figured out ways to build up new protections and they've done it most of the time by softening the literal view by becoming more in comport with the world and that's good I'll work beside the Reverend Barry Lynn any day of the week on church-state separation issues and will disagree on God well actually we probably don't disagree all that much but the fundamentalists there in the vulnerable position they have the most rigid structure and they have the most strict beliefs that are in direct defiance in many cases of what we know about reality and the more we know about neuroscience the whole idea and concept of a soul starts to evaporate and come in conflicts I think I think that the idea that religion and science are in conflict is not only true but it's obvious which is why there are so many challenges to evolution coming from religion why there's so many challenges to other potential conflicting things how we deal with that and what we do with it as a matter of strategy and opinion and hopefully we can get more more data on what actually works but my concern which some people would consider unfortunate is not just what works but what's true so when people back into that corner and say that they're just going to take it on faith can you argue against that is there any argument against faith yeah you can argue that the faith concept itself the idea of accepting something on faith is not likely to produce correct results do they care about whether or not their beliefs are true if they do then faith could never possibly be a good mechanism to get them to what they should believe what about personal experience can you argue against personal experience I mean I haven't had a Damascus Road experience I'm rather baffled as to what Saul was worth having one and I'm not maybe just hasn't happened yet I'll let you know can you argue against personal experience you bet you can't disprove their personal experience as a conversation I had last night with a woman who talked about how she had a vision of a pastor in her church and an angel surrounding him and there were arrows flying from the congregation and they and the angel protected the pastor from all of that it's a vision she had do I believe her yeah people have visions all the time people have I do I have an explanation for it no are there possible explanations yeah it's not my job to necessarily offer them and it's probably diminishing to what she feels and values from that for me to say oh that was just a hallucination or you had some bad seafood or you know you were part of this mass hypnosis thing in any number of things I don't need to offer an explanation what I need to do is get her to recognize that she has no explanation either the mere fact that she experienced this does not in any way increase the likelihood that the experience came from a God that she saw something that is real and is tied to the truths of religion and we know this because people experience these visions in all sorts of different religions and the example that I use over and over again has nothing to do with religion and that is I can walk out right now and talk to people who will relay their alien abduction story to me real live living people sometimes multiple people their stories have many many details in common and yet by and large we don't believe them or at least I don't I can't prove their stories are false but we tend to not believe them because it's not an because the story is extraordinary enough that it needs more evidence and yet there are entire religious organizations that have built their beliefs on less compelling evidence take those alien abduction stories write them up and come back in a couple thousand years where you have a history of people believing them and some scraps from the originals or sorry not from the original some scraps from some of the old texts we have no originals no no no Thurs you have no reason to think that that any of these people are eyewitnesses let alone the fact that eyewitness testimony is notoriously horrible horrible with respect to reliability and you've got copies of copies of translations of copies passed down this entire time but that's good enough because it's Jesus why well but I've had these personal experiences I have witnessed miracles Jesus has done amazing things for me maybe amazing things have happened for you but how did you come to the conclusion that it was Jesus who did these amazing things for you where is your evidence that connects your explanation to the event James Randi Educational Foundation investigates the paranormal the bus best they can ever hope for is to demonstrate a phenomenon for which we have no explanation because that boundary of broaching into supernatural explanations is beyond the pale it's not what science does I'm going to close out here in a second but I want to tell you something that I actually just read right before here in it it's a in Poland today or yesterday a 12 year old school girl by the name of Maria kiss Lowe was discovered hanging in her room by her mother when she went to read her a bedtime story and her daughter had left a note that said dear mom please don't be sad I just miss daddy so much I want to see him again her dad had died in 2009 this 12 year old girl took her own life sometimes past few days so that she could go to heaven to be with her again and what the mother said almost killed me if my heart hadn't already been partially broken I her mother said this is so unbearable if it weren't for the fact that my son was here I would stop living right now - not all religion is the same we want to paint religions with a broad brush and I'm sure Jason I have a conversation about religion and evolution or religion science and how much in conflict they are and we'd have to pause at the very beginning to say what do we mean by religion because religion isn't this monogamous thing or homogeneous thing there we go use a right word dumbass it's a we can't paint with a massively broad brush but that little girl is one of the reasons that I do what I do that's one of the reasons why I think other people are wanting to get more involved it's one of the reasons why I think we've seen so much in our numbers increase so much in the secular movement and people wanting to get involved in arguing so go ahead argue she can come up here go ahead and argue getting conversations be outspoken avoid please please please avoid the overreaching positions that shift the burden of proof making broad claims like well Jesus never existed might be true might not be it's not necessarily the best place to start but there's no reason to go there don't run when they're not chasing you don't shift the burden of proof let them try to do it so that you can point out that they've done it oh gods are gods an invented fiction and and here's these various biblical interpretations and views that almost nobody holds but I'm gonna argue against him anyway ask the person what they believe and why get to know them engage be skeptical be reasonable have confidence in yourself but doubt everything you believe and question everything be compassionate we were all worth it be honest you don't know everything you're not me and I don't know everything be caring towards people which doesn't mean that you cannot be ruthless and relentless in attacking their positions as long as you do it honestly and surgically and are clear that on many occasions I have violated this rule on the show I have said you're a moron and what I mean by that is in this situation on this subject you are being moronic and I don't look at it as an attack on that person's entire character I realize they do which is why I'm adding this little caveat and cautioning others I realize that they do my thing is we're all morons about something at some point and it's a shorthand for me to say oh you're being a moron or you are a moron and I'm trying to change some of that without getting any softer because religions by and large at least the versions that I tend to speak out about are vile and disgusting and harmful and poisoning the universe in which we live and I will never ever try to play nice about the actual ideas and the harm they do because that twelve-year-old girl didn't need to die ridiculous ideas are by definition deserving of ridicule some people will take it personally there's not always something you can do about that and still make the point because some of those people are offended that you and I even exist or that we won't sit quietly in the corner with our damn mouth shut how dare you I'm way over time aren't I anyway I was just like a lot of those people I was a rush limbaugh ditto head fundamentalist Southern Baptist occasionally going to Pentecostal churches because that's where the good music was bible-thumping horribly backslidden couldn't care less about Christianity just like everybody else there's a vicious circle going on there and my thoughts were my own and I was able to find my way out despite religious indoctrination despite all of the fallacies despite all of the pollution and so can other people and what they need is more voices they need to get to know more a theist they need to realize that half of the people that they know who they think are just in maybe spiritual or whatever they're atheists the guy that's picking up your garbage and the guy that's operating on your heart they're probably atheists actually the more scientific careers the more the higher educated the job is the more likely they're gonna be atheists that's that's something we need to fix - which is why I'm after the rednecks and I'm serious I'm dead serious that's my target fundamentalist literalists and rednecks because I'm tired of jesus take the wheel if I turn on country radio I want to hear something that's better than that I want to be able to say look Taylor Swift doesn't believe because I'm wet never mind go out and argue and remember that you're dealing with people and that it's okay to go right after the argument she might have a little you know like butter on the wound afterwards and let them know that you're doing this because you actually care about them and about what kind of world you live in and what kind of world you leave behind thank you all right you

Channel: Arkansas Society of Freethinkers

Views: 132,688

Rating: 4.8776698 out of 5

Keywords: Atheism, Matt Dillahunty (Broadcast Artist), RITR, ASF, Arkansas Society of Freethinkers, Freethought (Religion), Skepticism (Quotation Subject), Skeptic

Id: qo9Grli-k88

Length: 43min 54sec (2634 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 25 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/JoJoRumbles]

I love this guy. He makes so many good points and cuts through BS like a hot knife through butter.