Ask An Atheist

Sam interviews Becky and Lee in English about our episode “El Ateísmo en el Mundo Hispanohablante” and their outlooks on atheism.   This post highlights this interview for folks who can’t (or possibly won’t) follow the Spanish-language episode nine.

As a reminder, we will be subtitling episode nine at some point in the future.

Hey folks!

I’ve been on (a working) vacation the last couple of weeks, and I haven’t had access to the raw media to produce the podcasts.   We’ve fixed that problem, and I’m posting the podcasts as I’m able to process them.

Thank you everyone who (kindly) reminded me that the podcasts are an important part of the show.  Your appreciation is…uh.. appreciated?

Taking a cue from our beneficent fore-bearers at The Atheist Experience, today at 2 PM I’m going to shut off the stereo, kick the cat outside and ask Jesus to enter my life. If Ray Comfort and his ilk are correct, if I ask with sincerity and keep myself open to the Holy Spirit, I will experience a spontaneous conversion.

I’m going to try my HARDEST to purge any sarcasm or ulterior agenda from my thoughts, so that I can be as open as possible to the word of God. Wish me luck! (er, or not luck, I suppose)

Update:Nothing to see here. I was hoping that my cat, Yoshi, would wake up and blink at me in some strange way, or that I would get some kind of life-changing email, or a knock at the door. Nah. Well, you can’t say that I didn’t try.

Despite our brief presence in the online atheist realm, we’re elated to be getting response from the Internets. We also quickly learned that not all (in fact, A LOT) of the feedback is negative; we expected as much. But one criticism that has been pervasive, and been lobbed at us since our very first episode, is that we’ve been derided for being too much like the Atheist Experience.

This too is a critique which we anticipated, but in our discussions last year we mulled over this fact and determined that it wasn’t enough to stop us. We talked with members of AETV and made them aware of our intentions and we received nothing but encouragement. In fact, we prize our unique Northwest perspective: coming from a very liberal, “tolerant” locale, where we think the worst kind of naive theism thrives and lends cover to extremism. We also thought that since a few very large entities, like the Mars Hill Church and the Discovery Institute, lie right on our doorstep that we’d be uniquely positioned to mount a rebuttal. In short, we’ve got game that they don’t… and we’d also have the advantage as the “scrappy upstarts” to quote Pete Campbell.

All that aside, our viewers do act as a sort of barometer for our performance, which is why we take them seriously. We already have our token ALL CAPS TYPING THEISTMILITANT ATHEIST AVENGER(Edit: Sorry, Garry, we now know who you are), and plenty of other nearly incomprehensible rants slung at us. But given the amount of introspection we try to do to measure if we’re “doin’ it rite” (as Libbie would say), I get a great deal of heart when we receive things like this in correspondence:

And, also, thank you for your show. Yes, I’m an AETV fan. But, you’ve demonstrated something that they could never do on their own – you’ve demonstrated that the snowball of reason isn’t just getting bigger, it’s actually moving. Thanks again.

May that snowball become an abominable snowman of Godzillaesque proportions.

We’ll be off the air for the 4th of July this weekend (but if you’re in the Seattle area, you can catch the restored full episode 2 re-ran on SCAN TV on Sunday). Until then, guffaw at us amateurs before last Sunday’s show started: