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Talk Heathen

Talk Heathen 07.16 04-23-2023 with Richard Gilliver and Doctor Ben

Talk Heathen

Atheist Community of Austin

Society & Culture

4.7611 Ratings

🗓️ 23 April 2023

⏱️ 96 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

SHOW NOTES
In today’s episode of the Talk Heathen, Richard Gilliver and Doctor Ben take on callers with a broad spectrum of topics.
First caller is Erin in FL who views god pragmatically, does not believe Occam’s Razor is a great argument when uncovering the truth, and believes the idea of an afterlife is good. It is not always a good idea to use Occam’s Razor because we need to be aware of unlikely things. Could you see some problems with someone believing in an afterlife that doesn’t exist? Could this belief be used to avoid making real life decisions? The time to believe something is when we have sound evidence for it.
T in MO would like to talk about how the atheist response to the look at the trees argument validates any presumptions that theists might have about atheists being mean spirited people. Sometimes, the people who use this argument don’t realize how poor the argument is and in those cases, it is a good methodology to meet them where they are at. Most of the time, those who use this argument are practiced apologists who are using sleight of hand to dismiss any atheist response which is why you see the hard push backs from atheists against these arguments. Not everybody that wants to work together to discover the truth and there is a time and place to use aggressive responses.
Ray from IN wants to explain energies and let us know some secrets that we were all once great warriors that cycled through heaven because the devil made it to where death could come through heaven. Where do you find out about these things? Why do you think the Illuminati are fallen angels and what evidence do you have that they are not human beings?
Phoebe Rose in England has a friend that wants her to officiate their pagan handfasting wedding next week and as an atheist has no idea how to respond to this friend. Do you feel like you want to do this regardless of their beliefs? As long as you are comfortable doing this, there may not be a need to draw a hard line.
John in MT describes a study that shows how brain chemistry can influence every decision that we make and is evidence against the existence of the soul. If someone is claiming that the soul is supernatural and has influence on the natural world, there would not be unaccounted for brain chemistry. Having a debate on souls to begin with is granting far too much.
Zak in OK recently came out to their coworkers via email as trans. Some of the kids still use the term “miss” and draw Jesus symbols to place right next to the pride flag that was a gift from another student. The most fair thing to do is to leave up both symbols without letting the student gain control of everything.
Thank you for tuning in this week! The question of the week is: I know we aren’t intelligently designed because______.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome to Talk Heathen.

0:01.9

Despite not being convinced of the existence of any God,

0:04.9

we hold on to the hope that someone out there has the proof we've been searching for.

0:09.1

Who knows they might just call in on today's episode.

0:12.5

So I put on your Sunday best, because the show is coming right now.

0:28.7

Hello, today is Sunday, April the 23rd, 2023, and I am your host, Richard Gilliver.

0:33.2

And joining me today is, now hang on a minute, crew.

0:34.5

I'm not happy with this.

0:37.1

We don't have student Dr. Ben Withers.

0:58.8

We have actual Dr. Ben with us. Can we sort that out, please, crew? They're apparently going to take their sweet time with us. They're going to take the sweet time about it. One letter's time. We really should have planned this out before the show so that we wouldn't be doing this, you know, live on stream. They apparently don't want you to be actual Dr. Ben for quite a while because they're taking the sweet time.

0:59.7

Thank you.

1:00.3

There we go.

1:00.8

That's all.

1:07.7

Can everyone give actual Dr. Ben some big, big, big, big love, no longer student, Dr. Ben.

1:10.0

How does it feel, Ben, after all this time?

1:12.8

It's super weird. It's been 11 years of school. Well, two of those years weren't technically school, but I, so I graduated

1:18.6

high school in 2012, did five years of undergrad because I did an extra year, then worked as an

1:24.3

EMT for two years while applying for medical school and then four years of

1:29.1

med school and about to start residency. So this is a super long process. But it's very weird that we're

1:35.6

finally at this point because I think the delayed gratification for a decade of saying, well,

1:41.4

someday this is going to happen. And then finally, someday is now. And

1:45.2

like my brain still doesn't know how to work with this information. But it's, it's pretty

...

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