Talk Heathen 05.45 11-07-2021 with JMike, Kenneth Leonard and Nate Smith

Greetings heathens! Please welcome our host Jmike who transformed into Kenneth Leonard and is joined by Nate Smith!First up is Artie from NC who perceives atheists as being wishy washy when challenged on various shows by not being able to address questions of morality. It seems to him that atheists are giving ground in this arena. It is easy to get a theist to agree on something that is amoral. When we ask questions that show the theist is a slave to what the book says, there is no losing ground.Next we have Marlon from the Philippines that believes his prayer of financial assistance has been answered. He prayed right before going to bed, an earthquake happened, and there was a 1,000 peso bill under his bed when it was over. He has a video to prove this and will email us. Is it more likely that a god put money under your bed than you misplacing and finding this bill? He also claims to pick winning lottery tickets, and to never have lost a carnival game. Marlon, why are you struggling financially if that is the case? We will talk once we see the video.Michael in CA is looking into having more effective conversations with theists about faith not being useful. First find your definitions and go from there. We can get them to agree on believing true things and this will become an opening to understanding skepticism. If there is no evidence of the earth’s shape, yet you have faith that the earth is round, you are hanging your hat on nothing. However ,you don’t have to be certain to know something.Next is Charles in TX who proposes that morality evolved through natural selection thus putting pressure on altruism. If a person has greater altruism, then there is more morality. If people only took care of other people, and never did anything for themselves, things would fall apart quickly. When we define morality, the golden rule does not always apply. Be careful not to equate “what is” with “what ought to be”. Just because something is natural, does not make it good.Setuf in Spain would like to know why abortion is moral. We can address this by running a test of the trolley problem. How would killing five people instead of killing one person have a higher moral outcome? If you have the ability to divert the trolley to killing only one person instead of five, and you chose not to do anything, you have still made a choice and are equally responsible for those five deaths. There are all kinds of situations in society where we recognize that terminating the life of a being, is the right thing to do. Why is it okay to be responsible for the termination of five beings in the trolley problem yet you are not cool with the termination of a fetus?Jmike, our initial host in GA, wants to know what is objectively wrong about his ability to morph into Kenneth after using the bathroom.That is it folks! Thank you for joining us today for this oasis of reason in the vast desert of non-sense. See you next week!Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/talk-heathen--3195702/support.