Welcome to Karen Hunter is awesome. I know I got your attention bold, right? Yes, not really. I believe that you speak things into existence. And when people ask me how I'm doing,

I say I'm awesome. Whether I'm having a bad day or not, I think that you can literally use words as power tools

in your life. So I do. So this podcast is awesome, not just because I'm awesome and I am, but because I get to

talk with amazing, awesome people. So up next, stay tuned as I sit and talk with somebody who's truly awesome.

I hope you enjoy.

I believe that many of us are in bondage.

Several of us may be in bondage based on things our parents taught us.

And I think religion is at the crux of why we do a lot of the things that we do, both good and bad.

So I wanted to have conversations with really smart people who arrived at their religion in very

unique ways. And Jen Fulweiler, a stand-up comedian and the author of One Beautiful Dream. Welcome.

Thank you, Jen. It is such an honor to be here. I'm so glad we could do this.

Well, you know, you've been on my show a couple of times and we used to share a wall

between our studios. So I got to look at you, do your show, and you got to look at me, do my

show from time to time. And what fascinated me about you is that you started out as someone

who did not believe in God. Yeah, atheists all my life

before I converted, yeah. So define atheists because I think some of us may not know. Is it belief in

nothing? I think it can mean different things to different people. For me, I just said there is nothing

beyond what we can observe with the five senses. If I can't prove it, if I don't see strong evidence for it, if I can't touch it, taste, it, smell it, I don't believe in it. So I was a strict what they call atheist materialist. I didn't have a vague spirituality. I didn't ask the universe for any favors. Just a straight-up atheist. Your parents had to introduce you to this? Right. Yeah, my mom was one of

those people who just didn't talk about religion that much, but my dad and I did talk about it,

and he said religion can be used as a form of mind control, and you see people doing this. You see

it throughout history. And he said, you have to be careful with this, because religious beliefs can't

be proven. You have to be careful that this because religious beliefs can't be proven. You have to be

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