Hi everybody Mike here so glad you're tuning in. Thanks for the opportunity to play a small part on your journey and again we're always appreciative of feedback and support and all of those sorts of things.

Particularly, I want to say thank you to those of you who support us financially on

Patreon. That is an incredible gift and for which I am very very grateful.

Today what we want to do is and the goal by the way of the podcast. I mean the reason we do this is we want to help

make people curious about Jesus so so there is an increasing difference

between Jesus of Nazareth as he's portrayed in the gospel accounts

and the Christian subculture that claims to represent him and that's grown up around him

over the last you know 50 years and so

what we what we attempt to do is to try to note the differences between the

way Jesus actually was and the way that Jesus is seen and represented in our world today.

I've had an interesting article this week.

It was in the Atlantic on their website and it was lessons from atheists and I always found this I always you know I'm a sucker for those sorts of titles but But it was really interesting. So this group had taken it, and I don't remember the details of the article, but this group had formally taken it upon themselves to

uh... to to kind of seek out why it was a particularly younger atheists had become

atheists

and what was fascinating is some of the feedback they got back.

So they write this article, of course.

And it was just, I just thought, okay, this is, we're not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I thought this was something that was very, very interesting.

One of the things the article noted was that the vast majority of participants in their research

had chosen atheism in reaction to Christianity.

So they'd been exposed to it. They'd been raised in the

church. They'd attended church services. It was not, they didn't choose

atheism out of Islam, not out of Buddhism, but out of Christianity, which is fascinating.

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