Talk Heathen 08.38 with Doctor Ben and Scott Dickie

Talk Heathen

Atheist Community of Austin

Society & Culture

4.6 • 607 Ratings

🗓️ 22 September 2024

⏱️ 96 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In today’s episode of the Talk Heathen, Doctor Ben and Scott Dickie take on a variety of callers with intriguing subjects!

Ryan in MI wants to discuss OCD and religion, and explains how he has experienced people on the internet telling him his hobbies would send him to hell. How would you explain how this has affected you? How did this play into your way out of religion? Sometimes it can be good to put up some boundaries and take a step back from the internet.

Jackie in MS argues that religion is accurate and inescapable because humans rely on storytelling and religions are stories. Do stories have to be religious, and is all storytelling inherently religious in nature? Why is whatever is at the top of the hierarchy divine? What makes this holy? Are you supporting religion as an institution or are you supporting the claims that people make about god? By what you are saying, any book in this reality is true. How do the Judeo-Christian documents reflect a true depiction of reality? Why are you excluding the claims of Eastern religions? Richard Gilliver joins in at this point and explains that we are not interested in gishy gallop, therefore god, we are interested in why you believe. What convinced you that the Western society has it right? They weren’t founded on Christian principles anyway. Without quoting someone else, what value does religion add to your statements? Without redefining things, how would you convince us that religion needs this much attention?

Benjamin in AL wants to talk about the fallacies of supernaturalism and that supernatural claims can’t be justified through natural means. If you are claiming that something exists in our reality, you need to be able to demonstrate that. How would you go about justifying any supernatural claim and what are the reasons for believing in your god? How did you decide that you needed any religion at all? Why do you need a religion to tell you what to do and just have your own belief? What is keeping you in the church? Dr. Ben explains that being a patient of a code does not mean you have physically died. He explains that as you lose oxygen, you lose function, ability to ration, and things can be distorted. If you learned that these experiences had a natural explanation, would you still believe in a god? It is important to be critical of ourselves and our own beliefs.

Malylun, a monk in FL is curious about people’s opinions on monks, and describes some looks he gets in public with how he is dressed. A lot of the U.S. is not great with respecting culture. In many ways, it is just something that people are not used to and the brain is trying to categorize things that are new and novel. This could trigger a fear response and is why we see xenophobic things.

Thank you for tuning in this week! Talk Heathen to me of the week is: Title a porn movie starting Jesus!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Math gets a bum wrap.
0:01.4	That's surprising, considering that math and its twin sibling logic are literally the foundation for all other forms of justification.
0:08.7	Math is one of the primary tools of science and is at the core of all technological advancement.
0:13.6	Math is the sieve through its critical thinking filters anecdotes from data and the glue that builds evidence out of observations.
0:21.0	Sadly, math is rarely, if ever used, when discussing the existence of gods.
0:25.7	And when it is used, usually two things happen.
0:28.7	The person making the claim can't explain how the math was developed or why it is relevant
0:32.7	to the argument.
0:34.0	And two, the person arguing against the claim never presses for that explanation.
0:38.3	It's as if math were some sort of magical boogeyman that's invoked and then abandoned, with both parties glad to be rid of it.
0:45.2	Have you ever thought FI, the Golden Ratio, was just too spooky to be a natural phenomenon?
0:50.4	Have you ever thought that the circumstances of the universe were just too improbable to have
0:54.3	happened without a design?
0:56.3	Have you ever thought that the number patterns found in sacred text must be messages from
0:59.9	the divine?
1:01.5	Or like popular apologist William Lane Craig, have you ever thought that it was just too much
1:05.6	of a coincidence that math describes the universe so perfectly?
1:10.0	If I was just describing you, well, today is your lucky day
1:13.0	because we have a couple of nerds hosting the show,
1:15.5	and it's all starting right now.
1:24.5	Welcome, everybody.
1:26.2	Today is September 22nd, 2024. I'm your host, Dr. Ben. And joining me today, of course, is Scott Dickey. How are you doing today?
	...

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