There are show notes.

Dear Sam, I found your May 12 show fascinating because Dr. Peter Kreeft was the person who was most influential in my becoming an atheist. Here is the story.

It was late 2004 and I would have described myself then as a deist with God as first cause creator of the universe. My God did not do miracles and did not really interact with the world. I almost never thought about God or the question of God’s existence. For Christmas in 2004, I asked my wife for both pro and con books on capital punishment, abortion and separation of church and state. She bought me Peter Kreeft’s book, Three Approaches To Abortion. One of the approaches was what Kreeft claimed was a logical proof that abortion was always immoral. He included a challenge in the book for any reader to refute this proof. I noticed that his exact same arguments could be used to prove that abortion was always moral. At that time I did not even know that Kreeft’s argument included the fallacy of begging the question. But since he had presented a challenge I responded by writing a letter to him with my proof that abortion was always moral using the arguments from his book.

I did not even expect a reply but I did get one. He hand wrote on my letter, sometimes in red pencil, what essentially was a professor’s correction to my letter as if I was one of his students. What followed was an exchange of letters and emails that lasted for about eight weeks where we argued about morality and objective morality. I look back at this and now know that we were arguing about the Problem of Evil. At the time of our discussion, I had never even heard of the Problem of Evil.

At the same time that we were exchanging letters, the news in the Seattle area included a story about a 10 year old girl in Bremerton who gave birth after being raped by her step-father. I placed myself in the position of being a father of a pregnant 10 year old daughter. At the time my actual daughter was 36 years old but I could remember how she was when she was ten. I tried to imagine how I would have responded and I knew that I would not have stopped at red lights as I drove her to an abortion clinic. Dr. Kreeft told me that even though a raped and pregnant 10 year old was an awful situation, abortion was always immoral, a second wrong does not fix the problem and things would work out for the pregnant 10 year old because God has a plan for her life.

I decided to take Dr. Kreeft seriously and consider that I was an immoral person because I was willing to act immorally. I sat in my office chair for almost 7 hours thinking of nothing else but this situation and the moral questions associated with a 10 year old being pregnant. I though about God and what responsibility God had in the process of a 10 year old becoming pregnant. This struggle ended in a flash of insight that God is Dead. Any all-good God with unlimited power who allows a 10 year old to be raped and become pregnant cannot exist. I walked out of my office and told my wife that I am an atheist. I was stunned.

From that flash of insight I searched out books on atheism. I discovered Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, plus more. I discovered the Ask an Atheist podcast plus more. And the rest is history. The bottom line is that I give all the credit to Peter Kreeft for guiding me to become an atheist.

Thanks for listening.
Gordon from San Mateo, CA

And our other email, this episode from Josh, with our notes included:

I am a recent agnostic but am still working on letting go of chrisitianity. I religious friend of mine sent me this article claiming that there were new discoverers proving Abraham. It was on Yahoo news so it wasn’t a quack site. I appreciate any help you can provide.
Josh from The Internet

NOTES: LINK

• Archeologists digging near Ur, Iraq
• Home to Abraham according to the Bible
• 4000 years old
• partial ziggurat
• public building or administrative religious center
• 9-centimeter clay plaque showing a worshipper wearing a long, fringed robe, approaching a sacred site.

   

When we started out, I said I wanted to get the “who created god?” question out of the way at the outset.   This Facebook comment from regular listener Cheryl give me a chance to explain why.

Her comment:

And my response:

Your correction is really the next move in that particular dance, so I’m hesitant to accept it as a correction. “Why is god the great exception, and not the universe itself? Why not something else?”, is the move after that. Every atheist that’s willing to say so publicly has heard this argument. 

I brought it up because while it’s a valid question that atheists have, I wanted to get it out of the way so I could talk about things that are a bit more vital. The immutability of god is not an interesting conversation to me when god remains unproven.

The more interesting question for me is why the “big banger” has to be an intelligence. Many things are formed of natural processes. Many things are created by life, but not intelligent life. Even if this line of thought leads to evidence that something had to cause the big bang, we’re still very far away from proving an intelligence behind the creation of the universe. Even then, we’re light years away from proving that the intelligence behind it is the primitive tribal god of people in the middle east from five thousand or so years ago, as Professor Keeft would like me to believe.

There are show notes.

The video we talk about is available on YouTube.   The Greta Christina article we talked about in response to Paul from the US is available here.

Cheerleaders Permitted to Display Bible Verses

The initial Pathfinders will dedicate a year to clean water, human rights and construction projects, and will serve as a pilot group to evaluate programs for inclusion in a future Humanist Service Corps.

But there’s only 3 days left in their IndieGoGo campaign, and they are falling short!  I’ve a hunch that Peggy wouldn’t mind if you donated some of your extra cash not only to help keep the voice of nonbelievers in commercial media, but also to help opportunities for nonbelievers doing good works around the world!

Benny Hinn Needs $2 Million To Get Out of Debt

Benny Hinn Needs $2 Million To Get Out of Debt

Benny Hinn Needs $2 Million To Get Out of Debt

Benny Hinn Raised $1.4 million in an hour.

(Many thanks to these guys.)

Also, we’ll discuss the new discrimination coming out of Olympia.

UPDATE 1:   We got a request for links about the faith healing story.   This is direct from our show notes:

Faith Healing Still Doesn’t Work

Excerpt

If Sam can get the gear working right, we may even have an in-studio performance.

Thanks for waiting for the episode– given them musical nature, parts of this episode required a little more production than I usually do, and I wanted to make sure I got it right. Additionally, this episode is at a 128k bit rate, rather than our usual 64k.

UPDATE: Here’s a post from Shelley about her time here in Tacoma.