The Atheist Experience 29.01 with Forrest Valkai and Seth Andrews

In today’s episode of the Atheist Experience, Forrest Valkai and Seth Andrews, work calmly walk through questions from theists, agnostics, and atheists.
Arti in the UK wants to know why anything matters if everything is just atoms and nothing else as a helpful topic when talking with their dad. If everything is just atoms, what is the implication and why assume that nothing matters? Why does something need to be eternal to have value? Seth informs the caller that when you get into secular conversations about ethics, that it is still the wild west with people having a lot of different positions due to the lack of data.
Patrick in FL wants to talk about objective morality from an agnostic position. He mentions the idea of, “Do whatever you will as long as you don’t infringe on others’ freedoms and liberties in the process.” Both Forrest and Seth come from a position of minimizing harm when it comes to morality.
Samar in Pakistan, finds that it gives him comfort to believe in god and seeing his deceased loved ones again in the afterlife. Seth explains how this is one of the key reasons why people believe in the supernatural. What reasons would there be to believe that this is true? If someone finds comfort in another faith, would that faith be just as valid as yours? If you were born in a different place to parents of a different faith system, how would that affect your beliefs? Religion does not just offer comfort; it comes with a lot of shameful baggage as well and is used to justify a lot of evil stuff. Religious people are moral in spite of their religion, not because of their religion. Doing things out of fear of hell and not being concerned about the well being of people makes you a bad person on a leash. Seth outlines what he did to get over his fear of frying in hell and his process of healing.
Nikol in Armenia believes that if people don’t have some sort of punishment such as hell in the afterlife, they will do bad things. What would happen if people are taught to care for others, progress, and the value of life instead of god? Inclusive fitness is what we see in evolutionary biology which is why we see evolution in moral behavior among all kinds of animals. Under religion, how do you guarantee that people will be frightened enough to behave like you want them to? Why do you think there have been no atheist crusades? Seth describes measure called the World (Global) Peace Index that rates over 160 countries and states according to their peacefulness and shows that the less religious countries have a greater quality of life with less crime and misery.
Jayson in Australia has two questions about trans people. The first question is if drag is akin to black face. Black face was a way to stereotype, marginalize, and dehumanize black people. This is nowhere close to drag. The second question is about comparing transgender to transracial people. There are a lot of social constructs and none of them behave in the same way. The science deniers like to pretend that science of sex and gender are new liberal concepts even though we have been learning about these things for a century.
Thank you for tuning in this week!


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