AS147: Tommentary

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:32 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Atheistically Speaking with your host Thomas Smith. This is episode 147. Well, I'm just gonna launch into a commentary. You're gonna be getting some commentary today.

0:00:51 Thomas: Well, how many times are we gonna go on with this? I mean, every time, guys. It's every time there's a giant shooting There's more to say and I just don't know It really is incredible How often these things happen? It's almost like it's too often or that there's some, I don't know, there's, some systemic problem we need to worry about. I mean it is quite often Alarmingly often. I want to say I want to get the basics said. I really do. I think it's actually important. So I apologize if anyone is bored by this, but bear with me. I want to cover the basics for a good reason. So the basics are I cannot imagine how horrible this is for anyone who is in the area, knows anyone, family members. I can't even imagine. And I can't even imagine what it would be like to be a member of a group of people who's been targeted this explicitly.

0:01:59 Thomas: Man, I know that atheism is largely white males, and I'm just going to assume that my audience is also largely white male. I know it's not 100%, but how can you imagine? I mean, put yourself in that mindset of being a member of a group which was specifically targeted by this madman, this this just terrible piece of garbage and was murdered. It just just what would that feel like? That's awful. I can't even imagine that. I really my heart goes out to anyone affected. And and it's it's the saddest news there is. I mean, this one was particularly horrifying. And I also want to just say, for the record, for what little it might matter, this was a racially motivated crime.

0:02:53 Thomas: No duh. I mean, there's no- the- the no-brainer. Racially motivated crime. This was a racist, uh, and this was an act of terrorism. Done. Easy as can be. See how hard that is? Fox News or whoever else?

I mean, honestly, on the whole, I think most sources have been pretty good about calling it terrorists, but then again, terrorism, but then again I think that I, obviously, my media that I consume is gonna skew quite a bit liberal and quite a bit, you know, toward people who would be open to that.

I don't watch Fox News and I don't find it particularly interesting to follow them but maybe I should because people do listen to them and I've seen a lot of articles about how Fox News people were going out of their way to dodge calling it racism or calling it terrorism or what. I don't know why they have to go through all that, um, it's pretty ridiculous, uh, but anyway, I just want, I want to get all that basic stuff out there and get it said. I think it goes without saying. Um, I really do. I, I think it should go without saying that I, you know, I have nothing but heartfelt sympathy for, for the victims. And, and really, I, I hate this guy. I can't look at his stupid face.

He's just awful. I wish, anyway, I'll get into that later, but I wanted to, I wanted the basics out there because I think what I'm seeing a lot of, the the pattern that happens with these tragedies, is right away, a bunch of people are going to tell you what it's really about.

0:04:27 Thomas: You know, it's not about this. It's not about guns. It's about mental health. It's not about mental health, it's about racism. It's not about racism, it's about Christianity, you know? It's not this, it's about that. A lot of people, that seems to be what happens. That seems to, everyone has their angle, their explanation of what it is, and I just wanted to, I don't want to do that now. I'm going to talk about some things but they are very secondary things and they're very, they're, they're issues that this tragedy made me think of, but I want to make very clear that this is about a racist ideology. This is a, about, should be about the victims and sympathy for the victims, that I, I really just, I think for this particular shooting, I'm just so tired of the pattern of hijacking it for whatever your given cause is.

0:05:22 Thomas: I'm not going to say this. I don't think this has anything to do with atheism. I don't think it really has anything. To do with religion. I'm going to talk about some atheists and religious issues that, again, were kind of thoughts inspired by this event. But I just want to make very clear that I'm not out to try to hijack this terrible tragedy at all. I don't have anything really. I don't have a cause I'm trying to inject into this tragedy.

I just wanna make that very clear. Second bit of random thought. Write this down in the book of things that are never gonna happen, but I really wish they could. I wish we had some way, I don't know, as a country or as a world, as society, I really wish we could all agree on one thing, that when some asshole, some horrible just worm grabs a gun and murders people like this, that I wish, I wish it'll never happen. This is again, this is just dream, just pipe dream. But but in in a perfect society, well, this wouldn't exist. But in in in an imperfect society where this exists, I we ought to be able to just strike this person's name from the record. I don't want to see this guy. I don't want to his name. I don't want to see his stupid manifesto. I don't want his stupid face. How crazy is it that we're forced to go through this every time?

0:06:54 Thomas: Man, it's always a man. It's never a woman. Man or men commit mass murder, commit some horrible atrocity. Let's spend the next month. It might not be be a month, it's close, it's getting close, let's spend the next two weeks with this animal, this asshole, with his name and his face plastered everywhere. Let's just spend weeks talking about this guy, putting his name out there, wondering, getting people's thoughts about him, get taught, interviewing the neighbors. Well, guess what, he was quiet. Guess what, guys, he kept to himself, himself, he seemed like a nice guy.

Yeah, it's always that, there's not a whole lot of, well, yeah, that guy, he was definitely going to commit a mass murder. A hundred percent. I just didn't tell anybody. Oddly enough, actually I think his roommate did kind of say that, but but anyway, why can't we just get rid of this? We ought to do like we do, like George Harrison did with John Lennon's murderer, and just say don't say his name. I'm not going to acknowledge his name and I'm going to say that's what he wants. That's what he wants. He wants to get his stupid message heard. He wants to be famous.

I wish we could live in a society where we just assign him a number and we said, okay, well, this is asshole number 970 and that'll be his number. We'll just say 970 was convicted of the crime. Just very basic facts. And then we can have the conversation we need to about racism and all that.

0:08:28 Thomas: That's for sure. I just don't on a bunch of stuff about his personal life, his family, his dudes. It's just such insult to injury. I mean, honestly, doesn't anyone get tired of it? I don't want to see this guy's face. The top story of the new of Google news for weeks. Unbelievable. I also just want to say that Jake and I actually talked about this in our bonus content. We talked about gun control and very few of the things... I'm going to talk about it now, obviously, but I'm gonna try not to repeat myself for the lovely patrons who are getting the bonus content at patreon.com slash atheists. You can find that. I'm I'm going to try not to repeat myself. I actually have some different thoughts for it.

0:09:13 Thomas: In no particular order, now I want to talk about some of the thoughts I had about this. Again, this is not, I'm not trying to hijack it or make it into anything, it's not, these are just things, there were interesting parallels that I thought of with this event that made me think of it. First off, I let my favorite thing in the world, uh, guys, gun control. This is not about gun control.

According to, uh, Toby Keith, guns, would gun control would not have stopped this, so we can all, we all just rest, rest assured, but that, are that, the the person we would want on the job, if we all had to pick, like, hey, who would you want to evaluate whether or not gun control, you know, what, what scientists would you wants to tell you whether, you study whether gun control could have prevented this. Hmm, well, Steve Jobs is dead, right? Yeah, Toby Keith, he would be second, definitely. So Toby Keith has has decided gun control would not prevent this.

I'm getting to the point where I'll believe a couple of those, you know, I'll believe that there maybe is a shooting where certain gun control, maybe they bought their handgun legally or they stole it from someone who had bought it legally, purchased it legally, and therefore gun control of some kind wouldn't help prevent it. I'll buy that for one or two things. Here's the problem. Every single time, and you can almost set your clock to mass shootings now. There's, what, one a month? Maybe more? They cluster sometimes? Horrific mass shootings. I'm not going to buy that every single one.

0:10:45 Thomas: Eventually, it's possible that some level of gun control would have prevented some of these. Every time, you can't just go, well, gun control wouldn't have prevented this. And I'm getting to the point where I'd like to state my position on gun control. I believe that I would be okay with farmers, you know, with certain people. Farmers need rifles. I'd be okay with just anyone having a rifle of some kind, a very slow, you you know, not automatic weapon. Um, and I'm cool with even some, you know handguns of some kind, but it's getting to the point where not only do we need to restrict automatic weapons, we ought to just get rid of them. I mean, just get, just destroy them all, get them out of the country, just get rid of 'em.

0:11:33 Thomas: So at least if there's going to be a shooting, they're going to to be severely limited by having to have like very non-automatic, very manual weapons. And you can still do your American thing and have a rifle out on your ranch and shoot animals and stuff. You know, you can still do all that and we won't, you know, no one's going to come for all your weapons and all that, but we just don't need these semi-automatic weapons, these automatic weapons. There's no need for them. We need to get them the hell out of this country. It's never going to happen, unfortunately. Now, some people think we should ban all guns altogether. And I would say that I think there are very good, well, there are good reasons why people in the country need guns for animal control. And people are, people, not people, animals will come just eat your chickens or eat your, you know, whatever you're trying to protect.

0:12:25 Thomas: And furthermore, I almost would be okay with some level of personal gun ownership, just even not in that situation. But imagine how much good it might do to just completely dismantle and get rid of all the automatic weapons that are in the country. It could save untold number of lives. I really don't know, there was a stat that we brought up in the bonus content that Jake found where guns are actually never used for defense. They're almost, almost never, relative to how many criminal homicides there are for guns. Roughly speaking, there are one justifiable shooting death by someone defending themselves with a gun for every 32 criminal homicides with a gut.

0:13:11 Thomas: So the guns are just not really used for self-defense all that much. Now you can make an argument that maybe sometimes guns prevent crime and they're not fired or the person isn't killed. So that wouldn't be counted in the justifiable homicide stat, but still, it's not the ratio 1 to 32, I mean, it's not going to go up very much. Um, that, that's, they're just not used for that, we don't, we really don't need them, and I, I want to also say that, well, I saw a really good point that someone made, and maybe I'm late to this because I bet it was a bit dated, but I saw someone who said, gun control is never going to happen. Once we decided that the Newtown incident was okay, once we decided we could stomach someone murdering a bunch of kids, once once we decided that was OK and didn't warrant gun control, it was over.

0:14:04 Thomas: And, you know, that might be right. I really, I hate to say it, but that, that could be accurate. I mean, what, how much worse can it get? How much worse can it get than a bunch of kids being murdered? Not, not a lot worse. I mean it can get close. This is certainly close, in a church. Just a bunch of really good people killed. Really, I mean heartbreaking reading the biographies of some of the victims, just how awesome they were, just, just fantastic people. I mean you couldn't have at random, you would not have picked such a, just, a a good group of humans to to take away from this earth. It's really depressing, um, that being said, I mean kids, if we weren't going to do gun control when a bunch of very, very young kids, if we weren't gonna make major changes when that happened, what hope is is there?

0:14:57 Thomas: I mean, there would have to be, I don't know, there just have to be incredible numbers of shootings every year and there'd have to be huge and just, I, I dunno. I mean I really, as depressing as it sounds, I think that quote, whoever it was, that might be accurate. Once we decided we were okay with Newtown, uh, it's what, where do we go from there? I mean what, what would it, what would it take to not be okay with it? Now the next thing I want to talk about is how interesting the difference between how people react to this and how people react to Islamic terrorism is. Because it's almost a mirror image when someone like this, like this asshole, I'm not going to say stupid name, when someone like this kills a bunch of black people, conservatives kind of bend over backwards to try to make it about, not all conservatives, mind you, but there is a conservative group that tries to bend over backwards, making it about something else.

0:15:54 Thomas: Well, it's not about racism. He's a lone, he was nuts. He was mentally, he's just totally crazy. You know, trying to avoid the problem. And then when there's Islamic terrorism of any kind, well, this guy was just nuts. It's not, but that comes from the liberal side. And it's kind of odd because for me, it seems pretty look at both of those situations and say, for this asshole, hey, he was a racist. I didn't read it, but I saw someone comment about his manifesto because I have such a hard time wasting a second on just this animal. He's not worth it. But anyway, it's hard not to because you want to be informed and all that. But I saw Someone who read his manifestos said it was very lucid.

0:16:42 Thomas: It it wasn't crazy. This guy wasn't crazy. And based on what I've read a little bit about what happened that day, yeah, it doesn't seem like he was crazy. I mean, he had an ideology. He was, I don't know what you would call it. You could almost call him a victim of. He was a victim of an ideology, you know, although he's fine. So, I mean he would be in prison or maybe get the death penalty.

But in the the same way that Islamic terrorists aren't in are victims of an ideology, I think that it's similar. I mean, ideologies are powerful, they make you do things that are not beneficial to you and others, that's, it's it's so simple, I don't know why this is so hard. Yes, there are other factors, but when whenever there's this kind of crime with the shooting with this racism, no one asks, well, what, what American foreign policy is responsible for this terrorism? You know, is Israel, somehow Israel-Palestine responsible? No one asked that. That would be an insane question. It's very easy to see what's... No one asks what foreign policy, how Bush, too, is responsible for this guy. No one really asks that, how his foreign policy or some other American policy created this. Well, you can't blame him, it's because of what? That's how, that's what they do with Islamic terrorism. You can't blame them. They're, you know, it's foreign policy. It's mistakes we've made.

0:18:16 Thomas: Well, yeah, there's some level of that. But also when you have an ideology that is just bad, is harmful, is believes that people need to be killed or certain things, believes in a paradise for martyrs, believes certain things that's going to cause problems. People actually believe their their beliefs. And no one asks that. When people are anti-gay in this country, no one asks, well, what happened? What did we do? What foreign policy mistakes did we make? Nope, that's just an ideology. It's an ideology, people are Anti-Gay. Guess what's another ideology?

0:18:54 Thomas: Being incredibly racist and believing that white people are superior and other races need to be killed. That's an ideology. I don't get why it's so hard. It seems pretty pretty easy to me to say on both hands, yeah, there might be some level of, there could be some level of mental something. I mean, maybe he didn't, for this guy, maybe he didn't get some sort of nourishment in his, in his upbringing. I don't know. Something, some connection was missed that made him turn to the, yeah. There's other factors, but there's also a big factor, which is this ideology that we would be wise to continue trying to fight. We would be wise to continue trying to fight racist ideologies in the same way we would be wise to continue trying like anti-gay or anti-women or other ideologies like Islam or like extreme Christian kind of fundamentalism.

0:19:48 Thomas: It would be why it would be to try to fight those, but when it's religion, a certain group of people says no, but then when it is racism, that group of is totally into it. It's kind of funny how it works. Religion has a bit of of production in that way. Now, I have a, it was very lucky, actually, very fortunate. Steven Pinker tweeted an article, I think, this morning, and it was very interesting, and fortunately, I really think it drives this point home. It's awesome. It′s really long, I don't think I can read it all, I'm not going to read much of it, I don't think, but I'll read a little bit. Basically, someone, some people did a study about what really is the cause of evil or violence.

0:20:34 Thomas: And there are some theories that people have that don't work. And let's, let me read some of it here. In spite of widespread beliefs about its existence, sadism is so rare that That it is not even an official psychiatric diagnosis. So that that was just addressing like what one guess, one explanation of violence, that it's people are sadists and they get pleasure out of it. Its closest relative is psychopathy, but psychopaty is not characterized by malevolent joy at the suffering of others. Admittedly, psychopaths lack moral emotions and empathy toward victims, and they can be quite violent. In large-scale studies of criminal offenders, it has been found that around 10% of violent crimes are committed by those who score above the cutoff for psychopathy, whereas such people make up less than 1% of the general population worldwide.

0:21:28 Thomas: Clearly, psychopaths account for more than their fair share of harm, but that still leaves the vast majority of violent crime unexplained. Non-psychopathic people are hurting others in much greater numbers than psychopaths. These people aren't monsters. What motivates them? I'll pause there and I will say I'll post this link in the show notes because it's very interesting. It's on aeon.com, A-E-O-N.com. But already right there, that's a very interesting point. I tend to think of super evil people as psychopaths who lack empathy, but yeah, only 10% of violent criminals, according to the studies that they did, are that kind of person.

0:22:14 Thomas: So 90% of violent criminals supposedly are not psychopaths, as in they could be somewhat regular people. That's an interesting thing to bring up. The article goes on to talk about a couple of theories, I guess. One is the disinhibition theory. Maybe, so this is the theory, that maybe everyone has violent impulses to some degree, but they're held in check. But then, when something happens, their morality is blocked or, you know, they decide something goes loose, they're provoked, I don't know, their impulses take control and cause them to lose their temper and do something violent. But some people did some experiments and they tried to drain their subjects of self-control.

0:23:04 Thomas: So they wore down college students. Here, I'll read this. They wore down collage students by making them resist a tempting dessert or avert their eyes from a part of a computer screen. And the students became more aggressive in their subsequent judgments and behaviors. For example, they were more likely to deliberately blast a loud noise into the earphones of another person. So far, so promising for the disinhibition theory. Yet the experiments detected a pattern in these aggressive tendencies. They arose only in response to a previous provocation. In the sound blasting experiment, the aggression was directed toward a person whom the recipient believed had given them an unfair review on a previous task. When no provocation was present, there was no statistical difference in conduct between participants who had been depleted and those who had not.

0:23:56 Thomas: In other words, the aggression wasn't a random overflow. On the contrary, it looked like the test subjects were trying to get even. Now, such experiments might well indicate that some violence is enabled by loss of self-control, sure, but the disinhibition theory sidesteps the question of why we are motivated to be violent in the first place. The impulse has to come from somewhere, and the theory is silent on where that might be. So that brings up another theory. I'll just briefly summarize it. The other theory is that people use violence as a means to accomplish stuff, but then it says the shortcoming of that theory is that people constantly resort to violence when, by any measure of practical utility, nonviolent means would be more effective.

0:24:43 Thomas: And examples of that are, I guess, wars, Middle East conflict, let's see. Also, it cites the fact that punishment rarely deters these people, so they're not using violence as a means because the punishment would be greater. So the paper is now saying there must be some other theory or something that accounts for some of this because so far it's not just impulses and it's not just using violence to gain something because both of those have failed to explain the entire phenomenon. I'm going to read this next part because I found it really interesting. In 2007, the anthropologist Jeremy Ginges at the New School for Social Research in New York and Scott Atran of the French National Center for Scientific Research surveyed Israelis and Palestinians on the subject of the Middle East conflict.

0:25:38 Thomas: During these interviews, the researchers presented their participants with a series of hypothetical peace deals. Some deals included material incentives for giving up disputed land. A peculiar inconsistency emerged. A subset of the respondents saw the disputed land as just another resource. They were therefore willing to trade it for financial compensation and sign the peace deal, just as the rational model predicted. Other participants, however, saw the land as sacred, tied to their communal identity. For these participants, adding financial compensation reduced support for the deal. They showed elevated levels of anger and disgust, as well as increased enthusiasm for violence. The rational model cannot handle this kind of data.

0:26:26 Thomas: Adding material incentives should never make the deal worse unless the relevant utilities that people care about are non-material in nature. It looks like both leading theories of violence fail for one reason or another. Neither the disinhibition theory nor the rational theory provides a complete picture for why people hurt one another. And to the extent that we rely on these theories to reduce violence, we will fail too. What are we missing? Now, that's so interesting.

So, for some people, and this, again, was Israelis and Palestinians, they were able to treat the land as just a resource. Now, I wish we could increase the percentage of those people, by the way. I don't know how. But for some people, if you said, well, how about we compensate you for some of this land, it actually turned them off, like they became morally outraged.

And the paper goes on, I don′t want to keep reading too much, but the conclusion that the paper reaches is that That violence is mostly a result of moral anger, of moral codes, When we think our morals demand it, which is completely in contrast with people who think that, you know, terrorism is just, it's crazy people, blah, blah. Or this violence is just crazy people or this or this shooting wasn't racism, just a crazy guy. No, violence is most apt to occur when we feel morally outraged. And it just so happens that, I mean, honestly, this makes a lot of sense to me.

Like, people, violent criminals, I mean, maybe they do have some levels of the other thing that might have some level of impulse control problems, etc., but when people commit violence, they believe, they often believe they've been wronged and the other person deserves it, and that to me is like a, is something you can address on an ideas level.

0:28:16 Thomas: If there is a set of beliefs, a belief system, like racism, like white supremacy, like Islam, like any extreme fundamentalist religion that would encourage moral disgust at the wrong things, then that's going to be problematic. That could lead to more violence. And another thing this article said, just to try to touch on it, but I really recommend it, click the link when I post it, it's a good read, was that the ultimate goal, they think, of this moral outrage, it′s not, you know, the religion or it's not actually they didn't even talk about religion much, they did a little bit, but there's all these examples of violence they cite, but it's about, in their view, it''s about regulating escalating social relationships, which actually it makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

0:29:16 Thomas: You know, people have a sense of fairness and And some people have, I guess, just a terrible sense of fairness. Kids have a bad sense of fairness. And there's a desire to regulate social relationships. And I think this can be misapplied. I mean, when I think when a horrible man beats his wife, I think it makes sense to me that he's trying to regulate something like he doesn't. He's trying that relationship. He may have a very bad view of what that relationship is, but he doesn't think, oh, he's not crazy, I don't think. There's a lot of domestic violence. It would be very surprising if all those people were crazy.

0:30:02 Thomas: Now, he might lack some impulse control, but still, where does that violence come from? I mean, if he has this violent impulse, is it all just some instinct or or something. I don't know. I have no instinct of violence toward women. Maybe some people, according to this paper, maybe some people have a bad view of what moral fairness is, of what certain relationships should be. And when things come in conflict with that view, like, I don't know, your wife actually has a will of her own or does something you don t like, they respond respond violently. And again, I don't think this is a silver bullet thing where that is the cause of all violence. I think that it is a very interesting explanation.

0:30:47 Thomas: I encourage people to read this. I'm going to try to see if I can get a hold of anyone who is a part of it because I think maybe it could be worth looking into further. But I found this paper interesting and it makes so much sense to me. The moral outrage is the best. It seems like it would be the best less motivator to me toward violence. It really does. So I'm very curious to see, uh, if people read this, what they think. And, and also, like I said, I I'd be interested in learning more about this. So, but that doesn't that fly in the face of those people who are trying to say, oh, this shooter is just a, you know, he's just crazy. He's just a one-off person or, or, you know, doesn't that? I think it was very fortunately a timed that I saw this because I I really think it is relevant to this.

0:31:35 Thomas: It's this guy thinks he has something in his head that he's some expectation of how society is supposed to go. And he thinks he's morally justified in doing what he's doing. And moral outrage, you could see from reading some of the descriptions that he almost didn't want to go through with it, which is in turn the most heartbreaking thing. Thing. But yeah, moral outrage as the result of a lot of violence makes sense to me. I don't know. I like it as a theory. Oh, you know, one more thing that I think will maybe try to illustrate the point a little better. They wrote about, in this paper, they said, What about violence on the other side of the law? Advocates in the US have been pressing for mandatory use of body cameras to deter acts of police brutality. Could that work?

0:32:21 Thomas: There is plenty of evidence to suggest that people are less likely to engage in behavior that they believe is immoral when they know they are being watched. The thinking goes that if police know they're being watched, then they won't do things that they know are morally wrong. Yet often police and much of the public see nothing wrong with their actions. There's no data to suggest that people are less likely to perform actions they think are morally right when they know they were being watched. Therefore, it's not clear how useful body cameras would be unless there's a clear message from leadership and culture that prohibits the unnecessary use of violence. And it's very interesting because you did see those people. Now, I'm pro body cam just so that I think it will prevent a certain amount of it. It will prevent, there's got to be a certain number of officers who do know they're doing something wrong to some degree.

0:33:09 Thomas: But I also think in this day and age, every officer has got to already assume they're being filmed. In this day in age, everyone has a camera. Literally everyone, 97% of humans have a camera with them. Officers know that they're likely being filmed for the most part. And yet this violence continues. I think this plays into the theory well. I think it comports with this theory that they are laying out, that these officers actually think they are doing something right, that they think they're justified. They're morally outraged by whatever the victim or, well, maybe it's an actual criminal sometimes. Maybe the police are right in violence sometimes. Times, but they think they're doing the right thing, and that makes sense to me.

0:33:56 Thomas: So that was another reason why this theory rang true, and I thought it was very interesting and very apropos. One final little thought. Obviously, at this point, even Mitt Romney agrees we should get rid of the Confederate flag as a symbol for the government, for an official, you know, government symbol. Pretty crazy. But, again, this is just a tangential thought I had. It's funny how this works because people will argue, people in the South do argue, well, look, this isn't a racial symbol, it's a symbol of our heritage, you You know, it's what we come from, therefore we want, which again, to me makes no sense because I don't care about heritage. I mean, it is easy for me to say I am white. I probably have some heritage, but I don't care about it.

0:34:42 Thomas: I am interested in now and I am interested in people's ideas about now. I am not really interested in heritage, to be honest. As the great Doug Stanhope said, it's all tradition is dead people's baggage. Stop carrying it. But anyway, that aside, it's interesting how, in this case, we don't allow that argument. We don't, we just say, no, it is a symbol of racism. We don't allow you to say it means something else now, you know. But other times, we do allow people to say that. Like, honestly, isn't the Bible or a crucifix, those are symbols of massacre, of slavery, of justifiable killing, you now, justified by religion. I mean, if anything is a symbol of racism and violence and hatred and everything, it's got to be religious symbols.

0:35:33 Thomas: But it's funny that no one would ever make that argument, you know, besides me or maybe some of you. I don't know. But no one Would ever make That argument in a public way. It's all, no, I'll know it means something different now. Sure, religion was used for bad purposes back then, you Know, in the dark ages. But now it's fine. Or, you Now, sure, there's parts of the Old Testament that advise like killing homosexuals and doing that. But it It's a good symbol now. We're totally cool with that. Society is completely cool with that. It's funny how it's not cool with the flag. Again, this is just a tangential thought. It's not too serious. But really, though, don't you think? I don't know. Alright, well, I want to thank you guys for bearing with me through a long commentary. That was a long commentary.

0:36:22 Thomas: On Thursday, I have some people on to discuss the Elijiah T. episode, so it won't just be all me. I try to strike a balance between all me and not all me, and then next week we're going to be talking about Pale Blue Dot. I've already interviewed a couple people. I want to let you know, if you ever talk to me about coming on for Pale Blue Dot, I messaged you. So if you didn't get a message, let me know. If you read the book and you wanted to just talk about it, it could be five minutes, it could be 10 minutes, whatever. An impression from the book, something you liked that you got from it. I want to collect a bunch of those and talk about them. It's going to be real fun. I've already done a couple. They're great. I can't wait. So that's next week. So I just wanted to let you guys know, immediately get a hold of me.

0:37:08 Thomas: As soon as you hear this, if you wanted to come on for a brief Skype interview, very painless, I promise, it would add a lot to the show. So please, atheistically speaking, at Gmail or message me in some way, you know, some form. And then, yeah, everyone can join the book club. We're on Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, I think it's called, or Free Will, which I need to post the discussion threads for. But since the Pinker book is going to take forever, I might take my time on the Freewill book. Maybe I'll give it a minute. But anyway, thank you so much for listening. Let me know what you think. I want to hear your thoughts on this, on everything as usual. And yeah, email me if you want to come on for the book club. Thank you so mucho for listening, and I will see you on Thursday.