The Atheist Experience 27.42 10-22-2023 with Forrest Valkai and JMike

The Atheist Experience

The Atheist Community of Austin

Religion & Spirituality, Non-profit, Business

4.6 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2023

⏱️ 145 minutes

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Summary

In today’s episode of the Atheist Experience, Forest Valkai and JMike hoped to experience miracles as they wrestled with miracles, animals, morality, failed preachers, gender, and apes.

Ben in Utah has seen some miracles such as praying and fasting for a person to come back to church that worked, and the person came back. How do you know this happened supernaturally? How do you know there was not something in their life that happened to cause this? If this god is real, what is it doing and why is it useful to us? Apply the same rules of logic that you would for everything else when it comes to god.

Levi in Canada asks why it does not undo the concept of morality when atheists believe we are no different than animals. Non-human animals have plenty of morality such as empathy, grief, fairness and equality. The desire to obtain human well being is a source of morality for some, “Survival of the Fittest” causes more harm than good, falls into Social Darwinism, and is complete BS. If there is a being that has the ability to stop harm, wouldn’t you expect the being to prevent the harmful action? If god knows the future and everything that is going to happen, how can we have free will? If god is infallible, then it logically follows that god wants evil to happen.

Rick in Canada calls to challenge JMike’s position that Jesus is a failed apocalyptic preacher. Luke and John had to reinterpret what was being expressed in Mark’s account. It is not enough to cite the proof text. How do you know which red lettering in the Bible are the words that Jesus said? Early Christians had apocalyptic messages like Paul, and later believers had to re-interpret that as a spiritual notion. Reality exists outside of the Bible and we can check what happened.

Mike in Canada asks if Forest believes that genders are categories that we invent, and inquires about his earlier statement about nature fuzzy that we draw boxes around. Gender varies culturally and generationally so it is impossible to say how a man or woman should behave. Gender is something that we do, and not something that we are. Can you give us a definition of man or woman that is exclusively and solely based on physical characteristics? Just because nature is fuzzy, does not mean Biblical lines can be drawn to classify humans differently than animals. Based on the available data at hand, humans are primates, mammals, and animals. Also, sex and gender are two different things. This is not comparable to the arbitrariness of using the Bible.

James in California explains that if god did intervene, he would have to punish all of us because we became immoral. Could you freely not have sinned the last time you sinned? Was it logically possible for Adam and Eve to make the right choice? Could they have freely chosen good over evil? Is god a being that can instantiate any state of affairs that does not contain a contradiction? How are we not just tools for the end?

Thank you for tuning in! Question of the week: What is the real definition of the soul?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Here's a quote from Ken Ham from Answers in Genesis.
0:03.6	No, humans and chimps aren't nearly identical,
0:07.0	and that's not surprising, because we're not related.
0:09.8	Shimps belong to the great ape kind,
0:12.3	and humans were created distinct from the animals in the very image of God.
0:17.0	Adam from dust and Eve from his side and given dominion over creation including including the Great Apes.
0:23.0	And then he cites Genesis here.
0:24.6	That is a whole big basket of things
0:27.7	that don't make any sense.
0:29.2	First of all, kind isn't a kind of classification. That's not something that we actually use in biology.
0:36.0	Also, it's not just that humans are related to great apes,
0:40.0	humans are great apes.
0:42.0	That's not a matter of opinion or worldview or ideology. When you
0:47.5	classify great apes amongst the other animals, you have no choice but to lump humans in with them because that's where we fit morphologically,
0:56.9	behaviorally, and genetically. This is just someone who simply refuses to understand how actual biology works and is trying
1:06.1	to make excuses for a book which was written thousands of years before we knew how to classify animals,
1:12.3	as is very evident by other
1:14.2	descriptions of other animals in the books. But hey, I could talk about this all day.
1:18.0	If you think that humans aren't great apes or that we didn't come from monkeys or any of these other things that you hear from people like Ken Ham.
1:25.2	Call the show because it starts right now.
1:27.0	Hello, my name is Forest Valky and welcome to the atheist experience.
1:37.5	Today is October 22nd and I'm joined today by the lovely J Mike. How are you doing today? I'm a friend.
	...

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