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The Atheist Experience

The Atheist Experience 29.19 with Forrest Valkai and Godless Engineer 2025-05-11

The Atheist Experience

The Atheist Community of Austin

Religion & Spirituality, Non-profit, Business

4.62.5K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2025

⏱️ 98 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

(00:00:00) Intro by Forrest
(00:08:53) Nick-CA: Approaching Trans Rights
(00:21:26) Hank-TX: Some Evidence For God
(00:59:57) Dave-TX: Existence Of Eternal Hell

In today’s episode of the Atheist Experience, Forrest Valkai and The Godless Engineer, work with three callers who know how to have respectful and interesting conversations. 

Nick in CA wants to take an alternate approach to trans rights and ask the politicians why they care since trans is such a small part of the population. The primary issue is people being able to pick and choose who they discriminate against. The arguments we hear now are the same as they were when the hate was for same sex marriage. When people’s genitals seem to be at the top of the agenda, how can we get a transphobe not to care? Talk to some of the trans people that host with us and ask them what the most important and effective way to tackle the problem.
 
Hank in TX has scientific evidence that points toward a god. The first thing is how pleasant near death experiences are. How do we know these experiences happen right at the time of death? It makes sense that when the brain lets go, the loss of consciousness would be chill and not scary. His second piece of evidence is that things are going well, and his consciousness was not put in a body 200 years ago. What about the people who were born back then? How about the people born into bodies in war torn countries? Consciousness is an emerging property of the brain. What is your proof that it is transported anywhere? Even if we did have multiple lives over hundreds of years, it does not mean that there is a god doing it. The third piece is there must be a god guiding the response of people like Ghandi and Martin Luther King, and the response goes against nature. Why don’t we see this behavior in your god?

Dave in TX does not believe that hell where souls burn eternally exists. Is the Bible literally true or is it figurative?The god of the Bible is a monster. Where do we draw the line with interpretations? How is the resurrection of Jesus not contradictory when there are four different stories? Cover to cover, the Bible is pro-slavery, pro-genocide, pro-misogyny, is full of contradictions, and looks nothing like a god inspired book should look. What good can we get out of the Bible without the baggage of this evil god?

Thank you for tuning in this week, theists and atheists! Secular Rarity, our back-up host, joins to help close us out. See you next week!


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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Richard Feynman once said, I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.

0:08.5

There's lots of stuff that we don't know about the universe.

0:11.7

Even the things that we do know, like the Big Bang and the Age of the Earth and Evolution, we don't know everything about.

0:18.2

And we're constantly reminded of this by religious apologists who

0:21.5

point to anything that science can't answer yet as an

0:25.4

everlasting mystery that proves the existence of God.

0:29.6

And everything that science has answered as fine-tuned

0:33.4

complexity that also somehow proves the existence of God.

0:37.4

And of course, when I say God,

0:39.4

I mean their preferred God from their preferred interpretation of their preferred translation,

0:44.7

of their preferred version of their preferred holy book. But while we're all able to agree

0:50.3

that science has plenty of questions to answer because it is built upon the idea of questioning

0:56.8

things, try questioning that God. And suddenly, skeptics are labeled as disrespectful, arrogant,

1:03.8

or even dangerous. The very same people who consider their Google searches to be enough

1:10.0

to dismiss the expert opinions of the

1:12.3

world's most brilliant minds, scoff and scowl at any reasoned attempt to question the

1:19.4

unassailable wisdom of a God who can't even foresee his own failure with the power of omniscience.

1:28.3

Many of the people who call into our shows have built their entire identities

1:32.9

on a doctrine that they have never critically examined.

1:37.2

But if your God can't stand up to criticism, then why does it deserve the title of God?

1:47.4

If simply questioning whether God is good,

1:53.9

whether God is wise, or whether God even exists in the first place offends you, then maybe it's not the questions that are the problem. Maybe it's the fragile answers that you've

...

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