AS173: An Interview with Ryan Bell

Transcript

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

0:00:30 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 173. I'm your host Thomas Smith. Alright, so this week I have Ryan Bell. Now, I know what you may be thinking, and I mentioned it in the interview that you're going to hear. Ryan Bell's been on several podcasts recently. Yeah, well, this one's different. We talked about just an incredible range of stuff. The guy is really interesting. I was blown away. Seriously, I really enjoyed this interview. So don't be put off by the fact that he's made the rounds because this was great. It really was. And I want to thank Ryan a lot for that, for just being so interesting and having so much to talk about and being willing to answer all my questions that were possibly not related to anything that's going on in his life currently.

0:01:22 Thomas: But anyway, so another thing I need to talk about Is that the live debate, the first ever live Atheistically Speaking debate, is this Saturday the 26th. That's at 12 noon pacific time. Be there or be square. I've got the link in the show notes. I shared it on Facebook. I share it on Twitter. Please click that link. RSVP. Look, it's really important that people attend this event or, you know, online. Watch the event. Because, uh, and not for me at all.

It has nothing like I'm fine as long as, you know, the debate happens and then I'm, I'm happy because we had a debate and that's really cool. But if we want to have more of these, because this is the first one, if we wants to have more of them, I think it'll be a lot easier for me to get, uh... to recruit other people to debate. If the debate's a success, we've got participation, there's going to be a Twitter hashtag that's hashtag sufferingandgod, because that's the topic of the debate, and we'll be looking at any questions tweeted at that hashtag on Saturday. So please, seriously, please watch if you can. I know not everyone might be able to watch it live, but if you can watch it live, if you can tweet a question, I'd really appreciate it, because I would like it to go over well so that in the future I can point people to it and say, hey, this is how that goes when we have a live debate, so let's have another one sometime. And it's only going to be a very rare thing, but still.

0:02:57 Thomas: So thank you so much. Again, that's Justin Schieber and Robert Johnson debating on suffering and whether or not that's evidence against God. So very interesting. Saturday the 26th. Be there. Thank you so much. Okay, let's get to the interview with Ryan Bell.

0:03:26 Thomas: Joining me right now is Ryan Bell. You may know Ryan from Year Without God or now Life After God is what he's working on currently, although let me ask you already, are you still maintaining Year Without God or are you transitioning over?

0:03:43 Ryan: Boy, that's been a big question. First of all, thanks for having me on the show. It's great to be here.

0:03:47 Thomas: Thanks for coming on. Sorry, I get distracted with questions and then I forget to do the niceties. It's very nice to have you on. I appreciate you coming on. And I'm very happy to discuss some of the stuff that's going on with you. And now answer my question. No, I'm just kidding.

0:03:53 Ryan: Oh, no. Yes, yes, absolutely. I'm on it. I've been really debating it. Almost all of it is just practical marketing type of reasoning. I have a following on Year Without God and I would like them to see what I'm doing with this other thing, which I'm really really excited about, which we can talk about. But so I basically left the year without God blog on Patheos and I'll probably keep writing it. And I'll be hopefully curating.

0:04:11 Thomas: Oh, You said left. I thought you meant like you've left it. Okay. You gotcha.

0:04:34 Ryan: Oh, no, it's still there. Yeah. Sorry about that. Yeah, so yeah, right.

0:04:37 Thomas: Okay, I was like big announcement, guys.

0:04:41 Ryan: Just off the cuff. Yeah, like my Year Without God blog is still going on Patheos, and I'll probably be curating more other people's stories, which is something I've been wanting to do for a long time. Just people that have contacted me and that still contact me, that tell me a story, and then I'll write back to them on email and just say, you know, that's an amazing story, and I bet a bunch of other people would really benefit by hearing it. Would you mind, like, polishing it up with me back and forth until you're comfortable sharing it? And usually people are, are open to that. Sometimes they want to change their name, or whatever, if they're, and then if they're really, you know, in the closet, it still, then obviously they're not comfortable with it, which is completely fine. But there are so many interesting stories, and everyone becomes, uh, atheist in a different way.

0:04:42 Thomas: Yeah.

0:05:30 Ryan: You know, somebody, there are patterns, but, but there, there are uniquenesses as well. So that's, that's something I'm looking forward to doing with my, with my year without God website blog on Patheos. And then the movie will be coming out. Uh, there's a documentary. These guys were following me during 2014. And we're actually going to see a test screening on Tuesday of the of the rough cut to see it. That's the first time I know.

0:05:35 Thomas: Yeah, oh, wow. See, how did that get lined up? Did you, I mean, was that all prepared going into your year without God? I mean how did they find you? Was it from the first article you wrote?

0:06:04 Ryan: Not at all. Well, actually, from the first article I wrote, I probably over the first month, I got about five different emails from documentary filmmakers of varying qualities, like some of them were just straight out of film school, one guy was still in film school, and then there were a couple that were more substantial, but nobody famous, you know.

So I, and I was, I don't know if I really want to do this, it kind of changes things and it's a lot of work, you know, that I didn't intend, you know. I really wanted to focus on the research and traveling and talking to people.

And, and then this guy contacted me who knew me from church, he and his partner in this company called Earth Tones Media, and they were just starting up a little film company, and one of the two of them had started coming to my church, right before I resigned in 2013, and they were kind of on the edge of their religious beliefs as well, and they thought, you know, the Hollywood Adventist Church is about as liberal and Adventist churches you're going to find, maybe they could hold on to their faith in that context. And they started coming to church there, and within a month of them starting to come to church, they're, I, I quit. And, and then, so then when I launched Year Without God in January of 2014, they reached out to me and said, we've got to film some stuff. So because I knew them already and I trusted them, I was like, okay.

0:07:37 Ryan: And I, I,

0:07:37 Thomas: What perspective did you think they were coming from? Were they still religious at that point? Were they connecting with what you were doing? What did you think about their intentions?

0:07:50 Ryan: You know, as we talked, that was an important question for me because I certainly didn't want Christians to do it and turn, turn it into some kind of smear thing. Um, yeah,

0:07:57 Thomas: Yeah. Which definitely can happen if you've seen Ben Stein's stupid movie or, you know, they, they can do interviews and just edit out, you know, cut around it so that it makes you sound quite foolish. So there is a risk to that if it's someone you don't know, and it's a, could be a, you know, fundamentalist or something.

0:08:14 Ryan: Yeah. You really never know. Um, they were, so as we started talking about the possibility of them filming, even before I committed to letting them put it into a documentary, I basically said, you know, you can film, we'll talk about, let's just get into it and see what happens. So, but in talking to them, I discovered that they were in a very similar place to me in terms of their doubts about God and religion and faith. And they just, their perspective was truly, I mean, they were trained as filmmakers. So ostensibly their motivation was, we just think this is an interesting story. People are going to want to know about it no matter how it ends up.

0:09:04 Ryan: And at that point, none of us knew really how it would end up. I kind of had my suspicions that it would be pretty tough to come back to being a Christian, but I really would like to have come back to being a Christian. I mean, in the beginning.

0:09:15 Thomas: Well, that's interesting. That is some, some of what I wanted to get into. So I want to say that, um, I've heard you, you're, you are definitely making the rounds and I've heard some of your appearances and it's, that that's really cool. Um, I'm going to do my best for my listeners. I want to do my best to try to cover some different ground, because I know that I have a lot of listeners who listen to Scathing Atheists or other podcasts, so maybe I can try to, I'll see if I can get some different questions going. But I do think we should probably cover quick basics, if you want to lay out kind of what happened briefly, just for anyone who, you know, is hearing you for the first time on this show.

0:09:51 Ryan: Sure. Yeah. I, I was a pastor in the Seventh-day Adventist church for about 20 years, 19 years. And I had, you know, gone through seminary and then did a doctorate in church leadership and theology and finished that in 2011. But as I went along to make a long story short, and I, there are videos on my year without God, YouTube channel that kind of gives a longer version of my story.

0:10:14 Thomas: Sure, yeah, yeah. People can check those out, definitely.

0:10:17 Ryan: But the short version is that as time went by, I became more liberal in my theology. And the basic reason for that, again, very simply put, is theologians and anyone who's paying attention to their faith in a very specific, you know, like really paying attention, has to constantly fit new data into their theology. So when you encounter, for example, for me, it was gay and lesbian people. And I was told by my religion that they weren't acceptable to God, especially if they carried out their sexual desires and actually had sex. That, you know, that was really bad. And God didn't approve of that.

0:11:03 Ryan: But then I met gay people and I thought, well, they seem like really great people to me. Me. None of the horror stories that I had heard were true of any of the people that I knew. So that's cognitive dissonance, right? So all my career, I was managing this cognitive dissonance, whether it was LGBT people or whether it was science and creation versus evolution or whether it was church leadership issues or scandals within the church or whatever, you name it. I was liberalizing and liberalizing, essentially trying to make more room in my theology for this God to be present until it finally came to the point where my denomination, which is very fundamentalist American denomination, had enough of me.

0:11:50 Ryan: And we had a sort of a, sort of come to Jesus talk in a way. And, and I didn't come to the way they wanted me to. And And

0:12:00 Thomas: Yeah, Jesus can come to me. I look, is it that hard for him? Do I have to get up? Come on.

0:12:03 Ryan: Yeah, I know It's a little bit too much. So we went over all the hot-button issues that they had trouble with me about. And at the end of the day, actually, it was more like the end of the month of conversations. We mutually agreed that I was no longer a Seventh-day Adventist and a pastor for them. And so I resigned. And that was like, that was March 13, March 2013. And 13. So for nine months, the rest of that calendar year, I was just a combination of relieved and confused and feeling a little lost because it's the only thing I had ever done since graduating from my undergraduate degree in college. I had been a pastor my entire life. I had never even applied for a job.

0:12:08 Thomas: Yeah.

0:12:54 Thomas: Yeah, that's the part that I was very surprised about, because as I'm sure you've been questioned about and said, I mean, the reactions to your initial announcement were people really didn't know what to think, because, you know, is this some bullshit artist? Is this what you know, there are there are a lot of doubts. And I know you referenced with Scathing Atheist, Hemant Mehta, he even wrote something like, what was it? Make no mistake. I think I got it written down here. Make no mistakes. Bell is not trying on atheism, you know. Know, as his initial reaction to it. And I can kind of sympathize. I remember when I heard about it, I was like, well, is this a bullshit artist? Is this a Christian who's going to do a thing where he's like, oh, my life was horrible? Or what's happening here? And there were so many different reactions. And what do you think went into Hemant saying that and then later changing his mind just out of curiosity. Do you know? Were you in contact with him?

0:13:40 Ryan: We Didn't have any one-to-one contact until a bit later when he emailed me about the GoFundMe thing that he had started. But in the beginning, we didn't have any private communication. But the thing is, when I started "You Without God," I mean, no one knew and no one could know whether I was being sincere or not. And so when people accused me of being insincere, there was really no way for me To prove that I was being sincere, the only thing I could really do was to say, well, time will tell, you'll have to be the judge of it. And I could totally see the skepticism. It hadn't dawned on me that that's what I would do because that's just not something that I would, to be to be cynical in that way and to try to trick people. And I didn't know that there was a Hemant Mehta and the 50 some podcasts and conferences, some little, some very big, you know, I didn't, I

0:14:25 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, what did you think about atheism at the time? I mean, clearly you didn't know it would be so polarized and so, you know, or at least the atheism, theism, maybe you didn't know how much of a dynamic that was that people would have this reaction to you. So what did YOU know about atheism.

0:14:57 Ryan: Mean, I Didn't really know anything. I had read Christopher Hitchens' book, God Is Not Great, when it first came out. And I was a pastor, of course, at the time. And I remember quoting from it to my congregation and essentially saying, this guy makes a lot of really good points and we need to, oh

0:15:29 Thomas: Really? Wait a minute, when was this? I was gonna say, oh

0:15:32 Ryan: Six Oh seven, I mean, I think Because here's The thing, if you're a religious progressive or Christian progressive slash liberal, the arguments that Dawkins made in The God Delusion and the arguments that Hitch made in God Is Not Great are something that most liberal Christians could agree with. They, they are, you know, there are are points at which a liberal Christian will stop short and say, well, you know, and essentially the argument that I made was Christopher Hitchens is responding to a God that I also reject. He just,

0:15:34 Thomas: Man, right, right.

0:16:06 Ryan: He just doesn't know the God that I know, which is a much more loving, you know, he's God's a liberal like me, you know, like, And if he knew my liberal God, then he wouldn't be so upset about it. And I've learned, of course, since then, the complexities that are underneath all of that, too. But still, I feel that those books are more useful as a sort of as a leverage to help more conservative Christians examine their beliefs. They weren't as catastrophic to me because I was already quite liberal. I agreed with probably 90% of what they were saying, that so much evil. In fact, I was constantly saying to my congregation, "So much harm is done in the name of religion. We need to make sure we're not those kind of Christians. We need to make sure that we're not the Kim Davis types who are trying to force our religion on other people and prohibit otherwise wonderful American citizens from living their life as they choose," you know.

0:16:07 Thomas: That is a very common response to it. Yeah, yeah.

0:17:04 Ryan: So we even had an Adventists Against Prop 8 campaign, which was Prop 8, was in 2008, was California's proposition to outlaw gay marriage. And it was spearheaded by the Catholic Church and the Mormon Church and some other evangelicals. And we basically said as a religious liberty argument, there's no reason to restrict someone's civil liberties on a religious argument. It's against the Bill of Rights. And even if you disagree with homosexuality as a lifestyle or as a practice or as way of being, if you can disagree with someone's way of being. I don't know. But even if you disagree with it, yes, yes. So whatever your disagreements may be with gay people and their life in whatever way, still, if you're an American, you need to recognize that this freedom entails all people and not just you. So that was our initial, even though I had a much more sort of liberal view at that time, I wasn't allowed to let that on about it, you know, because of my job.

0:17:44 Thomas: Religious people have definitely accomplished that, but yeah.

0:18:12 Thomas: Well, okay, I have so many things I want to ask you and say. Let me say something before I forget. I just had a guest on from the Baha'i faith. I don't know if you know what that is. I didn't know what it was, but, oh, that's really cool. Well, she was excellent and I wanted to bring her up for several reasons. First off, if she's listening, Sahar, maybe contact Ryan about getting involved with his Life After God project, possibly, because she had a great story and she's freshly an atheist, like three months in, and her process was very similar to yours and it had almost almost everything to do with gay rights. It was very, very similar.

0:18:24 Ryan: Yeah. Yeah, I have a good friend who's a Baha'i leader here in Los Angeles.

0:18:59 Ryan: So is she still Baha'i? That'd

0:19:01 Thomas: No, she's literally freshly minted atheist. I interviewed her and she was like, yeah, I just very recently have decided I'm an atheist, but she turned in her letter of resignation and we talked about that. So it's very interesting. So maybe you'll get an email. I don't know.

0:19:18 Ryan: Be awesome. I'd love to get in touch.

0:19:19 Thomas: Yeah, it may be a perfect story for you. But also, yeah, the gay rights thing. Now, I went to church as a kid, but I maybe don't know as much about especially Seventh-day Adventists. Can you describe, and sorry that this might be a little basic, but so you were a pastor. Does that mean you have your own church where you're the head guy? Or like, how does the kind hierarchy work in that church? Because I'm very curious about how you were able to have this group, this sort of anti-Prop 8 group going, and was that part of your church? And like, because you described them, Seventh-day Adventists, as very conservative, right?

0:20:04 Ryan: Yeah, they are very conservative. And it's an excellent question, because the details of that actually do matter. So the polity of the Adventist church is more similar to the Catholic church in in the sense that the denominational body hires pastors and then dispatches them to churches, rather than, as is in most other types of churches in America, the local congregation hires their own pastor and is also responsible for, if necessary, firing that pastor. But my congregation didn't hire me per se, and my congregation did not have the authority to fire me either. If they wanted to have me fired, they had to go to my boss at the conference office, and persuade him that I should be fired or something, which is very difficult to do in the Adventist church. It's kind of like, I used to joke that once you're ordained, it's like getting made in the mafia. Like you're, you're kind of a, a made man at that point.

0:20:55 Thomas: Or maybe tenure as a teacher or something.

0:20:58 Ryan: Yeah. Tenure as a teacher, all the, yeah, it's, it's something along those lines. You really have to do something illegal practically to get, to get fired. So, and even then, right, right.

0:20:58 Thomas: Yeah. Or not illegal in the case of the mafia. You have have to not illegal enough.

0:21:09 Ryan: Right, right. Yeah. They're basically going to have to kill you to get you out. Is this the thing? So, right exactly.

0:21:12 Thomas: Yeah. But somehow you were gotten out. So

0:21:18 Ryan: Well, what happened was, no, see, the thing is, my local congregation, and herein is the dynamic, my local congregation was at my church. We were a church together because we were of a similar mind about these things. So we were, our whole church, not just me, was a little renegade within the denomination.

0:21:18 Thomas: Did someone complain or and how many people is that? Roughly?

0:21:42 Ryan: We Were, because we're Seventh-day Adventists, it was Saturday mornings. So Saturday Saturday mornings, we probably had, at a peak, we had about 200 people, 180. And then, but yeah, and when I started, it was like 50 or 60. And I would say a good average was around 150, 120 to 100.

0:21:51 Thomas: That's a lot of people. Jeez. And at this time, were you in the L.A. area or?

0:22:03 Ryan: Yeah, I was in Hollywood. That church is in Hollywood, yeah.

0:22:04 Thomas: OK. Oh, OK. Yeah, wasn't sure if you moved there since then or anything. OK, so do you think you're liberal? That was an appeal. Do you think that people people specifically, especially in that area, I would think, sought you out or your congregation out or stuck with you because of your liberal approach?

0:22:09 Ryan: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, there were a lot of Adventists who had stopped going to church and only came back because of our unique approach. And like I was telling you, one of the filmmakers, uh, also named Brian actually just had come to the Hollywood church and had been looking forward to it ever since he was in college in Tennessee, knowing that one day he would move to Hollywood to pursue his film career. And when he did, he could finally be a member of the Hollywood church. So we had, we had a kind of an, a national reputation, uh, in the Adventist church, which is sort of like saying a big goldfish in a medium size, you know, goldfish bowl. It's not,

0:22:47 Thomas: Wow. Yeah, I don't know. That's still pretty cool, though. I'm really glad that I asked that question because that's fascinating. So now I really want to hear what did happen. Did you just gather too much attention and then whoever's your boss, again, I can't remember the terminology you used, but who's ever above you, did they just notice. And so, so it sounds like you're saying no one complained or tried to rat you out as it were.

0:22:58 Ryan: No, my congregation didn't really complain. Of course, there are always one or two people, but I like to say I probably had a 95% approval rating at the church. But because we were going against Adventist norms, and because I was even then public about my views, I wrote a blog, and I also put up my sermons on a podcast every week. And then I also wrote for the Huffington post and my Huffingtons post columns were often about politics and social justice. So I would write maybe about immigration and what the Bible says about welcoming the immigrants and, and how like Republicans who were Christians were being really hypocritical, claiming to be Christians and then being so anti-immigrant when Jesus himself was an immigrant in Egypt for a while. So, I would make sort of theological points like that, um, saying like these guys would throw Jesus out if he, if he came for help, you know?

0:23:30 Thomas: Wow.

0:24:19 Ryan: And, um, so I was, I was vocal about my views. Sometimes they were political and sometimes they were religious and sometimes there was a touch of both. And my boss had been noticing, they had been putting up with me for a while. And then Prop 8, that campaign was not our local church's campaign, though they did know about it. It was more a group of progressive leaders. There was like six of us that started a website and a petition to get the Adventist church to drop its endorsement of Prop 8. And so that actually, I thought I would get fired at that point. I got called.

0:24:52 Thomas: I was going to say that probably ruffled some feathers, but given that that was in 2008, you hung around for a while. So I guess, I guess it wasn't too serious.

0:24:58 Ryan: I did. Yeah. I mean, it was serious, but I don't think they wanted to fire me. I mean to fire would have been, and it was when it ended up happening, it was a big story internationally in the Adventists church. It made waves and I, you know, they didn't want to make those waves if they didn' didn't have to. And but I really thought I might get fired because I got called into the office after I launched that website with my friends. And they gave me a stern talking to and but I basically in March of 2013, I had come to the point where I just didn't feel like dodging those questions anymore. I had been sort of telling half truths about what I believed and sort of avoiding telling them the truth about what I believed, say, for example, about evolution. And I'm certainly no biologist or geologist, but based on all of the evidence that I had read, which wasn't even very much at that point, I thought evolution is very likely the way that we all got here, the way we are. But I just didn't talk about it.

0:25:57 Thomas: Is that, um, cause I know officially like say the Catholic church recognizes evolution, but I know many Catholics who don't, uh, how does it work with Seventh Day?

0:26:08 Ryan: It's right up there with gay marriage. They would not tolerate a church leader, a paid employee saying they believe evolution. There there were some biology professors at a nearby Adventist college that were fired for a variety of reasons, but the main point was that they were accused of teaching evolution. And they, of course, their defense was that if wanted to put the puzzle pieces together and call it evolution, I mean, that was just sort of their...

0:26:39 Thomas: Yeah. I mean, it's, it'S so funny how that works. I I was misled the same way as a kid, even in California, because I'm also here in California. And even in Carolina, my public school education led me to believe, or somehow I was able to escape with the idea that evolution was just a part of biology that wasn't really too important. And that, you know, I remember the line too. It was like, well, micro evolution, maybe, but macro evolution, no way. You know, like that sort of thing. Even though I wasn't particularly religious, like somehow just the religious people around me or somehow I was able to escape with that idea intact. And then when you actually do some reading and figure out like evolution is biology, there's a biology is evolution.

Like you can't, there's no field without that. You know, it's not even intelligible, you know? I mean, you could, you could document some bugs or something, but like, what are you going to do without the theory of evolution. It's basically all of biology. And it's really amazing that in this day and age in California, somehow I was able to go through all the way, all of high school with that. And I think some of college. I don't think it was until I started reading on my own, you know, like science related, like Dawkins and that sort of thing that I really understood like, oh, evolution is pretty damn important. Now, of course, I wasn't a science major, so that's part of it. But, you You know, it's crazy.

0:26:39 Ryan: Right, right, right.

0:28:05 Ryan: I mean I think schools, Public high schools in particular are afraid of litigation and public demonstrations, having the school board inundated with parents.

0:28:11 Thomas: Yeah. Well, plus teachers probably just on an individual level, I think the most pervasive thing might be a teacher thinks, you know, I'm just going to downplay it a little bit. You know? Not officially. I'm not going to, you Know, maybe they haven't been directed by the school or anything, but maybe a parent or, you know, maybe they're worried about a parent coming and being mad about it. So I'm just going to kind of downplay the word evolution and maybe pretend. And I think that has a massive effect fact, because I think a lot of biology teachers probably do that. What do you think?

0:28:49 Ryan: Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, you can't help but allow your personal views to, I mean you can help, but I think it's easy to almost blindly allow your personal views influence things. I mean, we have Kim Davis doing that very intentionally in Kentucky, but, but I think other people in less public roles can, can just say, well, you know, it's a theory and right.

0:29:14 Thomas: Yeah, well, certainly, but I was thinking, maybe I'm thinking from my California perspective of, I think pretty much, you know, to my knowledge, every science teacher I had, of course, is just my experience, but, uh, I don't think they're religious at all or, or not very religious, but I think just the, just the threat of like, oh, maybe there's going to be some parent that's going to have a problem with it. You know, I think even non-religious or not very actively religious science teachers downplay it just to avoid the hassle, you know, it's just not worth it.

0:29:47 Ryan: I agree. Yeah. I think so. That's probably true.

0:29:48 Thomas: Yeah. So that's really interesting. And I have so many questions about, because I've heard your story. It's still fascinating. It'S definitely worth sharing on the broad strokes of it. But But one thing I'm curious about is I really want to know the particulars, if you can get into it, of what your beliefs were, you know, like how, so you still believed in God, but it sounds like in, let's say, 2008 or, you know, around that time, was there a time, when's the last time you can remember not being liberal in your religion? Like, or were you always? Always.

0:30:29 Ryan: No, I wasn't. I was very conservative growing up and my early college days, I was at a fundamentalist Adventist college and very much teaching a fundamentalist view of Adventism and of Christianity.

0:30:45 Thomas: When can you first remember that changing? And about when, roughly, do you think that was?

0:30:50 Ryan: I think what really started to change for me was being a pastor and not just being like a college student. So getting out into the everyday workaday world with people and being their pastor means essentially walking with them through all of life's twists and turns and seeing that life is messy and doesn't conform to easy crazy ideological categories, that people weren't nearly as high strung about theological minutia as I was, you know, it's sort of like when you, if you do something for a living and then you sort of like blink into the daylight and realize that not everyone else around you is, is nearly as concerned about all the stuff you think is so important. And they're like, Oh yeah, I never even thought of that. You're like really? I spend all day, every day talking about this. You've never even thought of it. Like it's unbelievable, right?

0:31:30 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it is, for some people, it's just a habit or an identity. It's not so much like they're spending every waking hour thinking about these issues.

0:31:49 Ryan: Right. It's more of a cultural conformity or something they've always done. And I,

0:31:53 Thomas: Have you read any stuff by Bart Ehrman.

0:31:57 Ryan: You know, I haven't done a thorough reading of Bart Ehrman in part because Bart Eherman was one of those very liberal theologians that we weren't supposed to pay any attention to. And he's sort of, what's amazing to me is the way in which ideologues can successfully dismiss serious academic people or just smart people in general with the wave of a hand. I remember hearing and believing that Bart Ehrman was kind of a hack, that he wasn't really to be trusted.

0:32:26 Thomas: Right.

0:32:27 Ryan: He was this liberal guy. But I never recall that claim being supported in any way. I never remember like, and here's an article, and if you read it, you'll understand why I'm saying that. Yeah.

0:32:38 Thomas: Funny how that works, huh? I

0:32:40 Ryan: So there was nothing.

0:32:40 Thomas: Can think of the exact same thing, uh, along conservative lines because I was raised in a conservative family. I can Think of the exact same kind of thing where it's like, wait, why do I hate this person? Why, why did, where did I grow up? What the hell happened? Why do I, you know, and it's, it's pretty pretty embarrassing when you realize.

0:32:51 Ryan: Yes. I, I Taught cultural studies for about four years as an adjunct professor at an evangelical college here in Southern California. And most of these kids, the white ones, especially, were raised in very conservative, politically conservative homes. But for the first time they were turning that age where they could vote and they were thinking political thoughts for the first time in their lives. And, and I could remember, you know, Obama was running for his second term and the debates were being televised in the campus commons and the students were talking about it. And some of those same conversations came up, like, I know I'm supposed to really hate Obama, but I'm not sure why, like what I really, I really like everything I hear him saying.

0:33:40 Ryan: And I'm like, well, just that's great. That's a great discovery. Just go with it. Listen carefully, make up your own mind, you you know? And people have that, you know, just people have that dissonance. You know, they have that. Wait, I've been told all my life these people are evil, but they're not seeming as evil to me as I used to think.

0:33:40 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Well, I want to ask you, oh, sorry, go ahead.

0:33:57 Thomas: Well, exactly. And that's why I think so many people have your experience with, uh, with gay rights and all that, where once you meet someone, I know I had that exact same experience. Once you meet a gay person, you're like, wait a minute. And I think that's a, that's Why it thrives in small towns so much, you know, it's like small towns. There, there are definitely gay people in small towns. Don't get me wrong. I know, I know several of them, but they're more closeted usually because of that risk. And so religious people in those, in those places might not even know that they know a gay person, you know? And it's like, I wish there could be more interaction because it certainly broadens your horizons quite easily. But the reason I brought up Bart Ehrman was it was sounding a lot like what you were saying.

And I, and I'm curious, I'll give it just a very brief sketch of what I've read him say, and I wonder if it's your experience too, where he went to seminary or whatever, he studied the Bible incredibly deeply, and he said that the things that people learn there to become, I don't know, whatever, pastors or whatever to become ordained, whatever it is, the things they learn about the Bible in a totally different way.

0:34:18 Ryan: Right. Yeah.

0:35:11 Thomas: And then when they go back to start preaching, to start, you know, having a congregation, Bart Ehrman says, like, they don't really teach that way. You know, when you go back To your congregation, you pretty much just talk about Adam and Eve as though it happened. But no one in seminary, at least that he said, like no one really believes that. They don't believe that the Bible is perfect and that, you Know, because they actually study the text, at Least where he went, very in detail, you Know,

0:35:38 Ryan: Yeah, this is such an important point. And it's it brings up a great opportunity for me to drop a little plug for my podcast. So no, no, I'm not worried.

0:35:45 Thomas: Absolutely. And don't worry, I wasn't going to forget, but, but feel free, feel free.

0:35:51 Ryan: No, episode two, and there's only only three right now. This week will be four. So episode...

0:35:55 Thomas: But you can find it at the top of the iTunes charts for, uh, other, just to let you guys know.

0:35:58 Ryan: That's right. That's right. On other. Religion and spirituality, other. Yeah. So I did an interview with Greta Vosper, who if your listeners haven't heard of her, they should just Google her. She's a fascinating person. Greta with two Ts, Vosper. And she's a minister in the United Church of Canada and a congregation where she's been 18 years in this congregation in Toronto. And And she, about 10 or 12 years ago, came to the personal conclusion, maybe more than that, about 14 years ago came to The personal conclusion that she didn't believe in a God, like an interventionist, supernatural being who does stuff like that she was done with that God, largely based, as you say, off of her training and research and her own reading and studying. And little by little, she became less comfortable with what you're exactly describing, telling her her congregation that in fact, that God is there, even though she doesn't believe that that God is there.

0:36:01 Thomas: Yeah.

0:36:54 Ryan: So she finally gave a sermon. She tells on this podcast episode, she tells the story of telling the congregation almost without notes, you know, in a sermon one Sunday, like, yeah, so guys, I don't, I Don't think that there's this God. And she scheduled a meeting with her board immediately afterwards to say basically like, go ahead, you can fire me. And they did it, you know, and so for years, they've been going along now, the United Church of Canada is trying to crack down on her, but for about 10 or 12 years, that congregation has been evolving toward a humanist community where theism is optional. They definitely have some traditional theists in the congregation, but there are many in the, in the con, in a congregation who are not, who are atheists, including the minister. And so I, I, and she says this exact thing that you're saying that Bart says that, that liberal seminaries where mainline ministers, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal, all these traditions where those ministers are trained, they learn critical theory related to the Bible.

0:37:53 Ryan: But then they go to the congregation and they say the Lord's Prayer, like there's a father in heaven, you know, and they say the creed, you know, that we believe in one God, the Father, you know, creator of heaven and earth, and as if it's true, and nobody blinks. And, and so out of one one side of their brain, they're like taking in all this critical information and probably are agnostic at best about most things. And then, you know, on Sunday morning, they are giving this message to the almost inadvertently, I would say, lying to the congregation about what they know.

0:38:29 Ryan: And for me, it is frustrating. And I always tried to be as honest as I could be in the pulpit. And the only way that I was ever dishonest, if you could put it that way, is just by avoiding things. And so, you know, my tradition was, believes that Jesus is coming very, very soon to cleanse the earth with fire and create a new, a new heaven and a new earth. Well, I didn't believe that even if I did think sometimes that maybe there would be this catastrophic end and a new beginning, I did not think it was the way that my church taught me that it was going to happen. And I did not think it would be very soon. So I just did not talk about it. I did not bring it up in sermons. It just did not come up at my church. Most people did not even notice that it did not come up. A few people who were very traditional noticed and would say, how come you never preach about end time events? Or how come You never preach About the soon coming of Jesus?

0:38:27 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. It's so weird. And it's kind of frustrating.

0:39:16 Ryan: And I would sort of equivocate and say, Well, you know, it's not the most important thing. The most important thing is how we live today, how we treat our neighbors, you know, how We live good, socially ethical lives here and now. That's what concerns me. If you want to hear a church, go to a church where you hear about the end of the world all the time, I can refer you to about 10, you you know, that are within a reasonable drive.

0:39:35 Thomas: Yeah. See, I would, I Would've seen if that person ever missed a week and the next week would have been like, ah, man, I did it last week and you weren't here. Ah, oh, well.

0:39:42 Ryan: Yeah, you missed it. Yeah. So yeah, I think that was my sort of dance around. And yeah, it's it became harder and harder. And then I just couldn't keep it up.

0:39:45 Thomas: Yeah.

0:39:56 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. And man, I keep getting off track, but you've got so much fascinating stuff to say that it's really easy to get off track. I think I am like four tracks over now from where I was trying to go or what I was trying to get you to say in the story. So yeah, we're, I'll try. We'll see. So no one complained, but what did happen with your firing? How did that eventually come to pass. Oh,

0:40:12 Ryan: Bring me back, bring me back. Well, I was I was called in to the office in January of 2013. And I knew it was coming because I had not been giving my tithe to the church in the way that they mandate that pastors do. And very briefly, tithing in the Adventist church is 10% of your income, which is generally the Christian tithe, the Jewish tithe.

0:40:39 Thomas: Really? Hmm. Well, it's Mormons do that for sure. Yeah.

0:40:50 Ryan: Yeah, yeah. So it's 10% of your outcome. And members of churches are volunteers, so you can't force them to do anything, but it's taught very, very stridently. And the pastors are not volunteers, they're employees. And so it's a condition of your employment that you give 10% of your income, which would be okay, I suppose, if they didn't require you to give your 10% to them, to the denominational office, the same denominational office that pays me my salary. So it's essentially like them paying me 90% of my salary and making making it a condition of my employment, a thing for which I could be fired if I don't do it. So I never did it. I always gave 10% or approximately to various other causes, including my own local church, which didn't receive any support from the 10% that I was giving to the denominational office, except for my salary.

0:41:41 Thomas: You always did that?

0:41:43 Ryan: I know I would sometimes give money to the denomination. In the very beginning, I gave my tithe to the denomination, but for the past many years, I hadn't. And they were going to crack down on it, in part because the finances were down, that year, for a couple of years, actually, in the denomination. And I think they saw it as an opportunity to beef up their finances. And they said, "Come January, we're going to check all the pastors' giving records and see if you've been giving tithe.

And if you haven't, you're going." So I knew that I was going to get a call, and I went in and I explained my rationale for why I felt a I was being generous, just not the way they wanted me to be generous. And then I finally capitulated and said, "Look, it is, you're right, it is the policy, and I've been violating the policy, fine, I'll give you the tie," except what I wanted in exchange was for them to, to approve of my ministry. And I said, "You know, you call me in here every three or four months to complain about something that I'm doing in my ministry."

0:41:50 Thomas: Okay.

0:42:39 Ryan: Can I get your, you know, I'm going to give you the tie. Let's just make a new beginning. But to make a new beginning, can you, can you give me your stamp of approval? Can you like approve of what I'm doing instead of me having to come in here and defend myself every couple months? They said, well, you know, bring you in here like that because we're concerned that you're not Adventist sufficiently in these various areas. And I said, well, let's talk about it.

0:43:05 Thomas: You're Adventist enough to give them your 10% though, right?

0:43:08 Ryan: Yeah, yeah, definitely that. So I basically at one point just said, look, it's truth day, ask me whatever you want, no equivocation. I'm just going to tell you what I think. And I'd never really done that before. So he started quizzing me about various different things very kindly, very, you know, without hostility, just asked me like, so what about creation and evolution? And I just don't think that Genesis is an accurate account of how we all got here. I mean, I don't think that's a very remarkable statement, actually.

0:43:34 Ryan: It's just what I don't, I think that it's different. And that even the author of Genesis, whoever it was, or the many authors of Genesis didn't have questions of science in their mind. It just wasn't on their mind the way a post-enlightenment scientist would have questions, questions of origins and science on their mind is just totally different world. There's no way that the book of Genesis is about scientific origins. It's just impossible. But yet that was, you know, one of the huge issues and same, same sex marriage and LGBT leadership within the church. We were welcoming a transgendered woman into our church and we were going to make her a teacher in one ofthe classes. And that was you know we the Adventist Church had progressed to the point of welcoming gay people, but you couldn't let them lead out in anything or transgender people.

0:43:33 Thomas: Right. Yeah, that's

0:44:22 Ryan: They really didn't know, know what to do with that. So, you know, it was just things like that. So I finally got called in over, over about two months, January, February, even part of March, we met probably four times for multiple hours each time, just me and my boss and had very nice cordial, but you know cordial conversations, but conversations which highlighted how many differences we really did have. And at the end he said, "I just don't think you can continue." And I kept saying that I wanted to continue because I liked my church and I thought the work we were doing was really good. So I finally just let it go.

0:45:03 Thomas: Letting a lot go, you know? I mean, 20 years, all your your schooling, all your everything. I'm, I'm pretty amazed at that. And it must be a testament to where you were in your mind that you were not attempting to lie or, or maybe not outright lie, but massage the facts a little bit so that you could stay in their good graces.

0:45:05 Ryan: Yeah, I think the I think The Cognitive Dissonance of it started, it was starting to take a toll on me physically. I had developed a gastro, you know, intestinal disorder and mild. And I had also developed a generalized anxiety disorder, which was also pretty mild. But I started to feel like I was falling apart, uh, physically and emotionally. And it was just a huge burden to bear. And every time I would go to pastor's meetings with, you know, a hundred colleagues, I just had this overwhelming feeling that I don't belong here. I just, it was sort of like going to a Southern Baptist convention meeting of ministers and thinking, boy, I'm sure glad I'm not one of these guys. And then suddenly realizing, but I am one of of these guys.

0:46:14 Ryan: And like, what the hell am I doing here? Like, this is not who I am, not even remotely. So I think the combination of the mental and physical challenges and emotional challenges on top of just the hard work of being a pastor and holding it all intention, just finally, I just couldn't do it anymore.

0:46:50 Thomas: All right, that'll do it for part one of this interview. There's much more in part two on Thursday. So, a couple quick things. Bonus content with Jake this week for all my lovely patrons. It's the least I can do for you guys being so awesome. If you want to check out that bonus content, become a patron at patreon.com/atheist. $1 an episode. You won't even notice it. It's like less than the price of $2 an episode, I don't know. So once again, just reminding you of that debate coming up Saturday. I know I talked about it a lot, but really important to me that we have a presence there, an online viewership that we can interact with. It would be a lot of fun and it'll be good. It'll be really good, interesting stuff.

0:47:36 Thomas: So I'm just reminding You again, check out that link, please. Facebook, Twitter, or just in the show notes, the link is there. Click on that event. Event, RSVP. I really appreciate it. All right. Well, that's all I have to say. So I'll see you on Thursday for the rest of this interview with Ryan Bell.