AS182: Portable Atheist, George Eliot

Transcript

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

0:00:31 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 182. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Alright, well, as I referenced on Tuesday, I accidentally skipped a month of Portable Atheist. I like to cover, you know, one of these a month. Very minor part of the show. However, I did skip a month, so I'm doing two this week, and since the Karl Marx one barely counted... Oh, quick note on that. I did get several messages of support on my Karl Marx analysis, including one that went pretty deep into it. So I appreciate that from you guys. I can't believe I forgot to mention this. One of my favorite underrated comedies is Mystery Men, for anyone who's seen that.

0:01:16 Thomas: And there's a part in the movie where there's this kind of guru guy who's training everybody up on how to be a better superhero, and he keeps using all these sentences where he reverses the words. And at one point he says, like, "If you cannot learn to master your rage," Ben Stiller says, "then my rage will become my master." That's what you're going to say, right? Right. And, uh, it, that, that is exactly how Karl Marx was for me. Almost every phrase was that it was like the master of the something, blah. And then he, but then he reverses the words and like, that's, that was everything he did. So someone sent me a message reminding me of that, not of Mystery Men. I'm the only one in the world who would link it to Mystery Men, unless, unless somehow that was the original, uh... Mystery Men writer's intent to link it to Karl Marx.

0:02:04 Thomas: I don't know. But anyway, thanks for those messages. I have to say one of my philosophies in life is to be like the little kid in the emperor's new clothes. I'm not, I'll be honest, I'm not really afraid to just point out when I think everyone is making a big deal about something that maybe I don't get. And here's the downside. There's a very real downside that I could just be not getting something. And so when I say, hey, this Karl Marx writing, I don't get it, I can't, it's unreadable to me. The very real downside is that everyone's going to email saying, oh, wow, you are an idiot. You don't get how brilliant it is? Here, let me point it out to you. Which, okay, actually, is that even a downside? It may be a downside for my perception, you know, people's perceptions of me.

0:02:52 Thomas: But in the end, maybe I would learn something from people telling me what I'm missing. But in this case, I don't think, again, and not to completely wash over everything Mark wrote as dumb or something, not at all. He has a weird kind of genius or he had a weird type of genius, but he wrote in a way that is, I do not like it. It is hard. It is very difficult to read and I do know that everything is as precise as it could be. The reason I bring this up is the transition to the next reading that we are doing, today's reading was, it's giving me the bends because we went from something that I can barely read, this Karl Marx, I didn't even tell you about the rest of it. Oh, someone did point out that the rest of the essay after the religion part is not even about religion at all.

0:03:41 Thomas: And Marx's thing is barely about religion. It's all about specific, I think I mentioned this, it is all about about specific German politics and stuff like that. So I think it's weird that Hitch said in his intro that the entire essay proves that religious differences are due to, or Unresolved contradictions in the material world. I don't really know where the essay said that. Now Hitch was a sort of genius of his own. He's probably getting that from somewhere. I didn't really see it and I know one of my listeners looks like he had really studied the text because he read German, I think it was. He read the original German and he said he didn't think the rest of it had anything to do with religion. So, interesting. Anyway, this was a complete 180 from that.

0:04:27 Thomas: This reading is by George Eliot, who, of course, is actually a woman by the name of Mary Ann Evans. Sorry, I forgot the rest of her name, but it's a woman named Mary Ann Evans who went by George Eliot, of course, to be taken seriously. Now, she wrote in a time when women could write with their real names. It wasn't like it was, you know, forbidden or they wouldn't be published, but they usually wrote works of kind of fantasy or were, you know... they're sort of stereotyped, and she did not want to fit into a stereotype and have her work be looked at that way, so she wrote under the name George Eliot. And I have to say, okay, so, she lived from 1819 to 1880. So, all in all, not too terribly long ago. A little bit it pretty similar to Marx actually.

0:05:14 Thomas: I think this book is pretty chronological. So it lived in a very interesting time from London and I just wanted to clear right now, this woman was really brilliant. She was, I can't even, this reading was such a joy. Now it was a little dense, it's hard, and I think it's dense in a good way. It's dense sort of in a genius way, where every point is very complicated, but unlike the Marx thing where it's like, well this is dense, but I don't really know what I'm reading, like I can really tell what's being said, and don't know that anything is being said. Sometimes every point is spelled out just right. The logic works.

0:05:52 Thomas: It's just great, you know? Clause by clause, I could know precisely what her argument was. Or most of the time, it was a really scathing insult she was laying down. So, the reading, So here's some cool background. There was this guy, apparently, at the time, who went by the name, who was named John Cumming, which is a, I can't help but juvenile-ly laugh at the name of John Cumming because he was a popular preacher at the time. He was an evangelical preacher who was very anti-Catholic. And so what was happening is he'd been publishing, or somebody had been publishing his sermons, or at least writings that were based on his sermons and stuff, and people were really liking it. And he'd actually led a lot of people to his church.

0:06:41 Thomas: It went from, let's see, it went from about 80 to about 900 in his time because he, something about him, I don't know, he really increased the popularity of his church, and like I said, it was a very specific church. It was anti-Catholic. It was, uh. Well, it's the National Scottish Church in Covent Garden where it was. And his two big things were being anti-Catholic and preaching about end times. So he was writing these papers and people were, they were being published widely and people reading them widely. And so George Eliot, AKA Marianne Evans, and by the way, I'll of course read Hitch's intro too. It's just, it's pretty brief, but I wanted to, this is kind of an interesting backstory.

0:07:26 Thomas: She at the time was writing for a publication called the Westminster Review. That went from, looking at the Westminster Review, it's really interesting. It was started by someone else we've read and Or at least talked about, and that's Jeremy Bentham. So interesting. Started by him in 1823, and it featured articles by James Mill, John Stuart Mill, so we've had experience with all those people. Kind of an interesting thing that this is interweaving. They're around the same time, same place. And in 1851, Marianne Evans, again, George Eliot, had kind of brought together some of her peers and became the editor. Assistant editor, and she wrote these papers in response, she wrote this essay we're going to read in response to this John Cumming, and it is scathing.

0:08:18 Thomas: It is unreal. I think that when I read this essay Okay, I'll just say Mary and Mary Evans. I'll say Mary Evans, you know who I'm talking about. I stopped saying AK. So when I read this essay by Mary Evans I Honestly, all I can think about is my own shortcomings. It's that kind of thing. It's like, it's like, you know, I'll pay a compliment to Noah over at Scathing Atheist. He's a brilliant writer and that show is very brilliant, of course, and he'll say things in a way where I'm like, man, man, I never would have thought to say that. Well, this is that, but no offense to Noah, this is that times a few factors because she was able to just lay out these devastating arguments but in a funny and insulting way, in an intentionally and brilliantly insulting way to this John Cumming.

0:09:12 Thomas: And the cool thing is so much of what she said really applies today. I think this was an incredible woman And I regret, she makes me regret how illiterate I am. I haven't read any of her books, But I know that Martin Amis, who was a friend of Hitch's, or, well, I think he's still alive, Hitch obviously not, said that one of her books was the greatest novel ever written, at least in the English language, and so very high praise, and when I read her writing, I'm not surprised. It has this element of genius to it that is, it's really cool. So we're going to go through that. Let me get to Hitch's little introduction first. Another student of Hegel and Feuerbach and and other German idealists was Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880, who wrote imperishable novels under the nom de plume of George Eliot.

0:10:05 Thomas: She translated David Friedrich Strauss's book Das Leben Jesu with its subversive claim that the purported events of the New Testament were mythical. In defiance of Victorian morality, she set up a home with the married freethinker, George Henry Lewes. George Eliot was one of the editors of the Westminster Review and in 1855 published an attack on then well-known evangelical divine. I shall be surprised if this essay does not remind you of some more recent religious performers. And totally, that, yeah, I'd said that earlier, it is strikingly applicable to this day and age and the the preachers in this day and age. So there's, from the pen of Hitch, the intro for today's reading.

0:10:52 Thomas: So she starts out with a really good bit on how if there's someone of certain characteristics, these are not really qualities, you wouldn't call them qualities, but certain characteristics like moderate intelligence, pretty much average moral character, glibness of speech, she says, what career should they get into? What would be the best career? And she says that would definitely be an evangelical preacher. Because then, and this is a really good quote, "he will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, and a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity."

0:11:37 Thomas: It's so good. So she's saying, if someone of very, you know, mediocre accomplishments and abilities wants to really make it big in the world, why don't you be a preacher? Sure. The bar is pretty low. And she goes on. Again, this is actually pretty long reading. I'm obviously not going to read the whole thing, but I wish I could. This This is one where it may be worth actually reading it for everybody. I mean, not me. I'm not going to read it to you guys. It'd take me hours. It actually would probably take like an hour and a half to read. It's very, very dense. But it's one you might want to check out. I wish I could quote the whole thing. I keep wanting to just quote the entire thing. That would, of course, be ridiculous.

0:12:23 Thomas: So I kind of have to skip through some good stuff here, but that's how she sets it off. She says, you know, if someone with a very modest ability wanted to make a big splash in the world, then this would be the career to go into. She then makes an equally funny point. She says, you know, most days, she doesn't say, you know, I should stop saying, you know, that's, she's much more well-spoken than that.

She says, You Essentially, priests must really look forward to Sunday because during the week everyone kind of has these working day interests and it's, you know, pretty hard to compete, but on Sunday everyone's attention, especially back then of course, now it's a little different now, but everyone's is on the preacher. The preacher becomes this super interesting person that just no one is going to boo or hiss the preacher in the church on Sunday.

And here's some language that I would like and figures shown up by his honorable friend on the opposite side, even the scientific or literary lecturer, if he is dull or incompetent, may see the best part of his audience quietly slip out one by one, but the preacher is completely master of this situation. No one may hiss, no one may depart. Like the writer of imaginary conversations, oh, I love this part, he may put what imbecilities he pleases into the mouths of his antagonists and swell with triumph when he has refuted them. He may riot in gratuitous assertions, confident that no man will contradict him. He may exercise perfect free will and logic and invent illustrative experience. He may give an evangelical edition. Perfect free will in logic.

0:14:14 Thomas: It just occurred to me right now what she meant by that. It took me a second. So, what a great phrase. I believe, if I have that right, perfect free will and logic, meaning this preacher doesn't have to deterministically go through logic. I mean, when you're making sort of a deductive argument, it's pretty deterministic. You have, one step determines the next. It's not as though you get to, but she's saying that priests can exercise perfect freewill and logic. So they just can go from one premise to the next with perfect free will. It doesn't really matter. I didn't even get that until just now. "And invent illustrative experience. He may give an evangelical edition of history with the inconvenient facts omitted. All this he may do with impunity, certain that those of his hearers who are not sympathizing are not listening, for the press has no band of critics who go to the round of churches and chapels and are on the watch for a slip or a defect in the preacher to make a feature in their article."

0:15:14 Thomas: "The clergy are practically the most irresponsible of all talkers. For this reason, at least, it is well that they do not always allow their discourses to be merely fugitive, but are often induced to fix them in that black and white in which they are open to the criticism of any man who has the courage and patience to treat them with thorough freedom of speech and pen." Okay, sorry for the long quote. I definitely can't keep that up or, again, like I said, this could take the better part of a day, but I wanted to read that one because I love that. I love that language. I loved that those turns of phrase, you know, just, they can do, you know, even people in the House, in a capitalized House, I'm guessing Parliament or something, they could expect to have their facts and figures challenged. Everyday people can expect to have their opinions challenged.

0:16:00 Thomas: Priests have no, on Sunday, no one's going to to challenge them. It never happens. The full attention is on them. They can say whatever they want. It was so well put. So after this great intro, she says, well, the meaning of all this, because of all these facts she's listed out and the argument she's made, she's going to focus on the writing, she is going to give some attention to the writings of Dr. Cumming, who is, as I said, John Cumming the guy I told you about, and because his writings are circulating and people seem to like them and all that, she going to take him down a peg. That's kind of the transition here, again, to summarize very briefly. Way. Then quickly through some of this, she talks about how he mainly just, like I said earlier, focuses on being anti-Pope, anti-Catholic, and talking about the more unpleasant things of the Bible, gnashing of teeth and so on, and she...

0:16:54 Thomas: I'm wondering if this is sort of a tactful thing. I don't think she comes out... she doesn't really write this as an atheist, per se, and I think that that's likely a product of the times. She writes it from a perspective of, look, the real Jesus wouldn't have been interested in his sermons, sort of. I mean, that's kind of how she presents it, which I think is smart. I think it makes sense in that time to, there's plenty of contradictions she can point out with this doctor coming without trying to disprove all of Christianity. But it's really interesting. We can kind of see the line that she treads there. Skipping ahead a bit after she levels some more accusations about the just terrible quality of his writing and stuff, here's a cool quote I found.

0:17:39 Thomas: There is not a more pernicious fallacy afloat in common parlance than the wide distinction made between intellect and morality. Interesting. Now, I would be curious to know more examples of that in her time, but she puts it as though that's a very common thing. I think that's true today as well. People seem to think you can either be like a smart, oftentimes in movies, there'll be some scientist character or something, you know, where it's like that you can Either be this brilliant number cruncher of a person, or you can have a heart and actually make good moral decisions. We're often given this false dichotomy in media and in art, loosely called art and movies, you know that sort of thing. And I wonder if that's what she's referring to.

0:18:25 Thomas: That sort of attitude, that same attitude that might have existed back then. Oh, here's some great language here. "He is in as much the same intellectual condition as that of Professor Padua, who, in order to disprove Galileo's discovery of Jupiter's satellites, urged that as there were only seven metals, there could not be more than seven planets, a mental condition scarcely compatible with candor. And we may well suppose that if the professor had held the belief in seven planets and no more to be a necessary condition of salvation, his mental condition would have been so dazed that even if he had consented to look through Galileo's telescope, his eyes would have reported in accordance with his inward alarms rather than with the external fact."

0:19:15 Thomas: This is where it gets really good, I think. "So long as a belief in propositions is regarded as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of truth as such is not possible, any more than it is possible for a man who is swimming for his life to make meteorological observations on the storm which threatens to overwhelm him." Listen to that quote. Isn't that so good? It's so perfect. So the image is great. The analogy is someone who's swimming away, just, just to go over it again, someone who's swimming from a storm for their lives, they're not reliable to make meteorological observations on the storm. And the analogy, of course, is that people are invested in their faith to that same degree.

0:20:01 Thomas: They're faithing for their life. They're believing in faith. They think their spirit, their soul is at stake, they're not going to be reliable to make truth observations that might go counter to their beliefs. Really good image there, I think. Now, in this next part, she goes on to talk about the sort of strawmanning that Dr. Cumming does, and this is very common with certain kinds of religious people, obviously not everyone, but they talk about atheists in a way, it's like they can't process that atheists actually don't believe in God, they still talk about it, the simple example would be like, well, you're just rejecting God. Hey, all of you listening to me right now, all you atheists, you're just rejecting God.

0:20:50 Thomas: Look, why, why are you rejecting God? And it's just like, no, that's not what's happening. So she, she uses some really clever language to describe that. And then she says, this, this is so funny.

0:21:04 Thomas: So here's, here's what this guy Cumming has said that is the creed of the infidel. So this is his version. And she says, we're favored with the following going sarcastically. Creed of the Infidel. This is his version of what the infidel thinks. The infidel being you or I. I believe that there is no God, but that matter is God, and God is matter, and that it is no matter whether there is any God or not. I believe also that the world was not made. This is exactly how you and I think, isn't it? He nailed us. But that the world made itself, or that it had no beginning, and that will last forever. I believe that man is a beast, That the soul is the body, and the body is the soul, and that after death, there is neither body nor soul. I believe that there is no religion, that natural religion is the only religion, and all religion unnatural.

0:21:53 Thomas: "I believe not in Moses. I believe in the first philosophers. I believe not in the evangelists. I believe in Chubb, Collins, Toland, Tyndall, and Hobbes. I believe in Lord Bolingbroke. I believe not in St. Paul. I believe not in Revelation. I belief in tradition. I believe in the Talmud. I believe in the Quran. I believe not in the Bible. I believe in Socrates. I believe in Confucius. I believe in Muhammad, but I believe not in Christ, and lastly, I believe and all unbelief." So here's what she has to say, this is so good, here's what she asked to say about his version, again, this is this Doctor Coming, this is his version of what we think, you and I, atheists, think. She says, "the intellectual and moral monster whose creed is this complex web of contradictions is, is, moreover, according to Dr."

0:22:40 Thomas: Cumming, a being who unites much simplicity and imbecility with his satanic hardyhood, much tenderness of conscience with his obdurate vice. Hear the proof, quote unquote. Well, now I have to read this. Sorry. Again, I'm so, I wish I could read this whole thing. It's so good. But I'm going to read this now that I let into it. I once met with an acute and enlightened infidel with, oh, this is one, this is great. This is one of those fake stories that priests use, that preachers use to, uh, and that she referenced as like, you know, they're allowed to make up any story they want and no one's going to hold them to them. I once met with an acute and enlightened infidel with whom I reasoned day after day and for hours together. I submitted to him the internal, the external, the experimental evidences, but he made, but made no impression on his scorn and unbelief.

0:23:28 Thomas: So, as Cumming tells it, he's met this atheist. They're called infidels back in the day, but I'll say atheist by today's parlance, in the parlance of our times. And so, as Cumming tells it, he's presented this atheist with all the proof, countless proof, there's historical proof, There's scientific, whatever it is. At length, I entertained a suspicion that there was something morally rather than intellectually wrong, and that the bias was not in the intellect, but in the heart. And one day, therefore, I said to him, I must now state my conviction, and you may call me uncharitable, but duty compels me. You are living in some known and gross sin. The man's countenance became pale. He bowed and left me.

0:24:16 Thomas: Oh, man. I may end up just not being able to go through the rest of it, but I have to read this because this was my favorite part. She says, here we have the remarkable psychological phenomenon of an acute, quote-unquote, acute and enlightened man who, deliberately proposing to indulge in a favorite sin and regarding the gospel with scorn and unbelief, is nevertheless so much more scrupulous than the majority of Christians that he cannot embrace sin and the gospel simultaneously. Simultaneously. So I want to, I might read more, but I want to stop to make sure everybody understood that. So she's saying like, here's someone who, why can't this guy, so the story again, just briefly to summarize is that there's this atheist who just won't accept God.

0:25:05 Thomas: And so the doctor coming is convinced and he confronts him. He said, you know what you're living in, you must be living in sin. And the guy is so, it's sort of like one of those terrible religious movies that Noah and Heath and Eli make fun of in their delightful podcasts, making fun of Christian movies. Sort of like one of those movies, the atheist has just got pale, stricken by this argument, runs out of the room. So she says, who is this fake character who doesn't do what every Christian does and just live in sin and not care?

0:25:40 Thomas: Embrace sin and the gospel simultaneously is what what she says. Who is this character, this rare character that actually cares so much that he doesn't just do that? Who is so alarmed? I'm going to continue reading for a little bit. Who is so alarmed at the gospel in which he does not believe that he cannot be easy without trying to crush it? Whose acuteness and enlightenment suggest to him as a means of crushing the gospel to argue from day to day with Dr. Cumming? And who is with all so naive that he's taken by surprise when Dr. Cumming, failing an argument, resorts to accusation and so tender a conscience that at the mention of his sin turns pale and leaves the spot. If there be any human mind in existence capable of holding Dr. Cumming's creed of the infidel, of at the same time believing in tradition and believing in all unbelief, it must be the mind of the Infidel just described.

0:26:32 Thomas: For whose existence we have Dr. Cummings' ex-officio word as a theologian, and to theologians we may apply what Sancho Panza says of the bachelors of Salamanca, that they never tell lies, except when it suits their purpose.

0:26:48 Thomas: So, wow, I can't believe we're already at this time. I, yeah, man, okay, I'll try to summarize through some of the rest of it, but I couldn't resist because these quotes are so good. I mean, this reading, it was very enjoyable to read. I think you all should go. This one, if you have the book, definitely don't just rely on my summary because we haven't even gotten through. This is not even the better. This is like, this is not Even a quarter of the reading so far. It's very long and dense. And thus, hard to do it justice without just quoting the entire thing. Because it's funny, these arguments and these little insults. If I just summarize and say, well, he or she talks about how, you know, Dr. Cumming makes up a fake example. I mean, you know, I can summarize it.

0:27:36 Thomas: Dr. Cumming is making up a straw man. It's not real. But boy, are you missing out on a lot if you just hear my summary of that point. I suppose I'll have to sacrifice covering a lot of this for just covering the great highlights, because this reading is just full of great quotes that I would really not want to just summarize in my much, much less interesting way. There's another example here where she points out that he uses this like dramatic form in his writing, and then he, Dr. Cumming, confuses partway through, he confuses like who's talking, and kind of she says we don't even know, did did the character actually say this, or did he just think this?

0:28:21 Thomas: So it really, it really does remind me, it's, it, it sort of is the equivalent back then of a atheist podcast of some kind, of just a really good podcast. Good, because it is all pretty much just insults. It's not, I wouldn't call this, I think it's absolutely brilliant, but I wouldn't call it like scholarly writing per se. It's not like a, this isn't a philosophy paper. This isn't, oh, here I am laying out several good arguments for why this person's wrong. This is just a good old fashioned ass kicking is what it is. It really, but in the most brilliant way, which is why I think it's, it's almost like like an incredibly good podcast. If someone did this nowadays about a preacher and just ripped him a new one like this person is, it is sort of like what Noah and Heath or Cognitive Dissonance are doing.

0:29:15 Thomas: It's sort of that. It just is. But I have to say, again, no offense to those fine folks. I have quite a few levels of magnitude more brilliant. Not to say they aren't brilliant, but really you should read. I want to say this may be my favorite reading of this book so far, and the one that I actually recommend you should just read. This is Evangelical Teaching by George Eliot. I think I forgot to say the title. Sorry about that. Now, I've noticed that the version that was actually published is a little bit longer, so that's part of what Hitch did with this portable atheist, is he edited a little bit. It. So if you find it online, it's going to be a little different than what I've read to you because I looked at an online version too, just to check it out.

0:30:05 Thomas: And so if you want to read it and you don't have the book, you can find it offline, but it has a bit, probably a bit more fat, maybe hitch trim the fat a little bit, made it a little better. Maybe that's one reason why it's so good. All right, well, I definitely need to summarize and stretch out a bit to cover most of this, because I really want to do you guys the favor of not stretching Portable Atheist into three straight episodes. There's no way I'm doing that. I very, very easily could make this several episodes, but I'm not going to. So, to do terrible injustice to Anne's words here, I will say that she next talks about how Cumming claims that science is perfectly in accordance with the Bible. Like, the Bible is never, in every iota of its scientific claims, it has been proven correct by, by modern science.

0:30:57 Thomas: So, that's pretty funny, of course, because it's not even close to true. And then, so, but I have to, I gotta skip over stuff. So then, I think the next interesting point I'll talk about, and I'll just summarize this here, and we'll call it a day. She talks about how Dr. Cumming, and this is a, this is something I've certainly heard religious people talk about. He says that all, basically all human thoughts are evil. Like most of our thoughts, everything we do, it's, they're just not good because, and you know why? It's because they're not in service to God. Everything we think, everything we doing, everything, every little thought we have apparently, according to this this lunatic, um, is that it should be making God, it should be in praise of God, making God our priority and everything, everything that we do.

0:31:48 Thomas: And she talks about how just really backwards this is. And it's cool because she references this person. It's kind of interesting when you're reading these old texts, pretty old, not, not as old, obviously 150 years or So it's not too terribly old, but they she makes kind of a what I would call a pop culture reference at the time, which is really interesting. It's so fascinating because it's the sort of thing you'd expect to hear nowadays with some, like in a Hitchens debate, when he would bring up, well, this is sort of the opposite point, but Hitch would bring up that awful guy in Germany who, that father who like imprisoned his daughter and was doing horrible things to her and stuff like that. He would bring that up as a, can you believe this?

0:32:33 Thomas: I mean, can you believe that God would allow this? Well, similar to that, and it's really fascinating to see the sort pop culture reference that would be made back in this time. She says, okay, so everything is for the glory of God, right? That's why everything should be done. She said, doesn't this really nullify charity, good work done for merely good human reasons, like being kind and all that? I mean, that does not really just cheapen that. And she says, what about the deed of Grace Darling? And I was like, who the heck is this? So I looked her up. It's apparently this story at the time of someone, of this girl, I guess a young lady, you would say, someone, I think she was maybe in her 20s, who lived and worked with her father in a lighthouse and saw that there was a shipwreck and made an effort to help rescue everybody.

0:33:26 Thomas: Buddy, it wasn't like the most amazing hero story or anything, but she apparently gathered some fame for this, and um, fame is enough to where this is something that you, Mary Evans. Oh, I think I called her Ann earlier. Sorry about that. It's Mary Ann Evans. I remembered Ann instead of Mary. Mary Evans, popular enough that Mary references this story as like, look, would this person have done this if it just was the glory of God? How about rescuing these people in this boat accident? This shipwreck would be a better word for it. How about rescuing them for compassion or the chance at helping others, you know, I guess she risked her life to a certain extent. So I thought that was pretty cool that it was like this little pop culture reference.

0:34:14 Thomas: And this, by the way, this, what was her name again, Grace Darling, who rescued these people or helped rescue these people, she received all kinds of money and like marriage proposals.

She was sort of a minor celebrity for it for some reason, before before social media, very odd, but then sadly she died of tuberculosis at a pretty young age, so it was just an interesting little sub-story to read, and something that's funny to see in a periodical at the time, Mary bring up as an example of like, why would you want everything to be done for the glory of God?

Wouldn't you want things to be in order to, you know, help people out of good motivations, that sort of thing? So she sort of ends by taking that tact that I mentioned before where she's, she's trying, she's not talking as an atheist, she's not writing as an atheist, she's saying, look, I think there are good Christians who after reading this might Be plenty opposed to this doctrine that he is espousing, despite the fact that they're both Christians, like, I think she thinks, or she's, you know, writing that she thinks even religious people should be sort of disgusted by this guy, because of this doctrine that he's teaching that is just not moral, moral, it goes against Jesus's teachings, and she's taking the line at the end saying, I don't bear this person any ill will, I don't think Dr. Cumming is evil, I just, you know, I think he has a just a bad misconception of what religion should be, and he's not very, well, she summarizes everything she said, but she does try to make it a little tactful, like, we don't have any other reason to believe he's malicious, but here's this doctrine he's teaching, and we think it's wrong.

0:36:04 Thomas: She says we a lot. I don't know if she means the royal we. She probably does, or if she was, you know, if this was published with another person. It doesn't say it was, but I'll go ahead and assume it was the royal we. So I, like I said, I had to skip over a lot and summarize pretty poorly a lot, poorly in respect of her brilliant language. I mean, compared to the way she was able to make her points, any summary pales in comparison. So once again, I highly recommend this one. This was very enjoyable to read. Alright, well, I think I'm gonna call it there. Like I said, I could quote this forever, but I'm not going to. So no more, don't worry, no more Portable Atheist for a month.

0:36:51 Thomas: I'll try to stay on schedule with that. Got some exciting stuff in the coming months as well. I'm thinking about a bit of a format change, and I promise you it'll be for the better. I may roll it out sooner. I was gonna wait till episode 200, and then I realized it's actually quite a bit of time still to go until 200. I thought it was, I misremembered and thought I was on 192, 182, but it was 182, so I think I may roll it out sooner than that, and it'll just be, I promise you it'll be for the better. I know you guys know I often fret about decisions like this, like, oh, I can get unsure of myself, are people gonna like something I do, or if I change something, I've decided I need to just go with my instincts, because I think that's what's brought me this far, and I think I'm going to do something that will make it a little more regular. You'll know what to expect more on a day-to-day basis from the show, and I think it'll be good.

0:37:48 Thomas: I think it'll be a good thing. So that's on the horizon. I'll let you know when I actually do that. You'll know. And I also want to say thank you so much to all my supporters. I had two new ones, Alexandra and Senator, Love your suit, on Patreon. Again, if you're going to patronize me, feel free to use whatever weird name you want. I don't know if that's a reference to anything. I know, Senator, Love your suit, is that a, yeah, I don't know, I can't think of, I don't think that's an inside joke for me, anyway, so it must, maybe it's a reference to something, I don't know, but in any case, thank you so much for the support, uh, that's of course at patreon.com/atheist, and I'm going to thank my all-time greats, Zimu, Zinu, Adrian Borschoff, Michael, Jonathan, Moye, Jay, Aldenwalt, Bangs, Naughty Bits, Peter, Peter Skelton, Brian Gareford, Dale, Matt Garrett, and Samantha with the honorable mention.

0:38:42 Thomas: Thank you, supporters. Thank you so much. And as always, you can hit me up anytime on Patreon. And I like the messages I get from you guys, and I like to chat with you. So thank you. And lots of good comments on the last few episodes. Maybe I can... Actually, let me talk about a comment real quick. Here was a quick and dirty one. Is atheism at all culpable for atheist shooters? No, it can't be. Atheism has no directives at all. If we say no, are we being hypocritical when we blame Islam for terrorism? No, Islam has many directives, and that was by Kryphos on the website. So that was obviously in response to the episode I did a week back or so about the Second Amendment and blaming atheism for atheist killers.

0:39:28 Thomas: I think that's a little too easy. I worry that that's too easy now. Now, I agree, you can't blame atheism as a concept. You can't claim the, you know, what would you call it? I don't want to call it the philosophy. You can'T blame, it's weird to call the belief system, but you can'T blame the rejection of theistic claims as having directives and as being culpable. I agree. But it could be possible. I could imagine a set of circumstances where you could blame atheists as a a group, sort of like how Muslims, if there's a group of Muslims that completely renounces everything in the Quran or anything that could lead to violence, you would have to say, well, that when someone, you know, commits violence and cites certain scriptures and they say, we don't believe that's that writing.

0:40:21 Thomas: We don't listen to that. I would say they aren't really to blame as a group because they've renounced that. But if, say, there were, uh, there was an atheist group where rhetoric had specifically in that group started getting violent and, and they did start to add on that bit of, well, we need to do something violent about the fact that all these people are wrong, you could blame that group of atheists.

You could start to, and again, it wouldn't be blaming atheism, wouldn't to be blaming all of atheism. Just but I could at least see blaming a group of atheists and being worried that we don't want to ever create that set of circumstances where atheists... But I don't think we are. I want to be clear. I don't think we are. And I do think that while you can never blame atheism as a concept for this violence, you can blame Christianity or Islam in some circumstances for some violence because it It does entail, as he's saying, as Kryphos or she is saying, it does entail certain directives.

And I do agree for the most part with that. I just want to add the caveat that I do think if circumstances went a certain way, not that they are now, if popular atheism as a whole did start to exhibit certain tendencies and start to Exhibit certain violent rhetoric, then we could blame them just in the same way that other groups that have been violent have been atheists, not that it's the atheism that creates it. So just minor clarification there. But I do think that's a pretty good, quick way of summing it up.

0:41:57 Thomas: So thank you, Cryphos, on that. I do Think it's important that we're not adding, we can't add the part where, and therefore we should kill all these people. That's the part we can add. And that's the Part that you're culpable if you do add. So quick comment there. And there are lots of them. Thank you guys so much. There was also a very positive result in the Canadian election that I had Krakus on to talk about. So maybe I'll have to have him back for a quick recap on like, okay, what happened and, and, you know, what are the going to be the good effects of this election? Because he was talking pretty direly about it. And I think, I don't know, I didn't remember him making any prediction on what would happen, but it's good news that the Liberal Party won. It seems like good news anyway, for, from my perspective, maybe not everyone agrees with me on that, but so that'd be cool to talk to him.

0:42:48 Thomas: Okay. Well, that's enough of me for this week. Thank you as always for listening. I love you guys so much. And, uh, I will see you next week.