Pat Flynn, welcome to Pines with Aquinas. How's it going? It's great to be here, Matt. It's going well.

You drove down from Wisconsin. That's right. With your wife and four children. That's absolutely right, yeah.

Why? Because you invited me. And we wanted to get up Wisconsin. What's your wife doing right now? She's in the hotel room, which is, you know, the kids love the hotel room, but hotel friends are just not very kid friendly. They're certainly not tagli-friendly. So it's a little stressful. No, it's brutal. I remember. See, my kids are a little older right now, so my youngest is bribable, he's six, but y'all have some young kids, yeah. Yeah, but thanks for,

thanks for being here. We had you on the show about, I don't know now, was it a year ago? I think that's right. We talked about atheism. We talked a bit about your conversion, stuff like that. We want to talk about it today. Yeah, just a repeat. Someone just said in the chat, like, wait, didn't we didn't they just do this so props to the guy who follows me we'll try we'll try to do some

new stuff yeah we'll see what did in the chat. Like, wait, didn't they just do this? So props to the guy who follows me.

We'll try to do some new stuff. Yeah. We'll see.

Did you identify as an atheist? I forget from our last interview. How old were?

Well, that's a good question. I think, I think something that gets overlooked in some of these

conversion stories is how gradual the process is, both in and out.

Yeah.

So for me, I can trace back, I think, some significant events in my life that caused some

original doubt, right?

One was in the fifth or sixth grade, sixth grade, because the year 9-11 happened, right? I kind of link

these two things together because you saw the towers fall and like my worldviews started

collapsing at the same time. Yeah, it was just the teacher and science teacher, just sort of

outlining the basic, you know, origins of the universe story and me thinking, well, this isn't what I was taught in my

first grade Sunday school class. And there was just that first internal tension. This was,

yeah, around the sixth grade. So, yeah, you can probably figure out my age from there. Yeah,

it's amazing to me that so many people are, like at that time, I'm'm 31 by the way. So at that time when you're in

sixth grade, I was 17 and much smarter than you. Now I'm older still, obviously, exactly the same amount and you're much smarter than me. So I don't know how this happens with all these sixth graders. You have a much better beard than I did. But yeah, okay. No, I know what you mean. It is cool how kids do

kind of absorb those things

and they don't even know

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