this computer. Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour at WOZO Radio 103.9 LPF. I'm here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, February 12th, I guess it's Valentine's Day. Right here in Knoxville. Anyway, I am Larry Rhodes or a DJ, and as usual, we have our co-host, Wombat on the line with us. Hello, Wombat. Go sports! Sorry, Boudreau. Love it. We have, as guests, John Richards from England. Welcome. How the devil are you? Fine. And Boudreau from the luxurious country of Kentucky, Kentucky. Welcome. Howdy, y'all. Oh, he nailed it. A Digital Freethought is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, Satanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious faiths, gods, holy books, and superstition. And if you think you're the only non-believer in your town, well, you're just not. Here in Knoxville, in the middle of the Bible Belt, we have a group of over a thousand of us, nearly 1,100 now. We're the atheist society of Knoxville or ASK. And we'll tell you more about us at the mid-show break. So be sure to stick around. Wombat, what's our topic today? We're going to be talking about the Super Bowl and apparently advertisement that's going to be in it and what we can talk about that. And then follow up with some chat GPT nonsense. Though I would like to start today. I have our Discord open where we can field questions. And I'd like to start with like an interesting flash pan of quick questions and answers from us by the group to get a flavor of what we think about a bunch of stuff as we get into like these heavier topics. Doubter Five, this is a question for you that just popped up by Homo Bonobos. They want to ask, can anything be done about the in God we trust written in all our U.S. currency? Not as long as it's a national motto. It was voted in as our national motto probably between 10 and 20 years ago. I can't remember the number. No, no, no. About 56 wasn't it? Well, originally it was put out of money in 56. But it was voted as our recent. Anyway, as long as it's just a national motto, in any case, we can't we can't say anything about it because they're just putting the national motto on their government vehicles. But that's what we need to change.  Everything out.  Yeah.  Well, it's another police cars too. That's the problem. Yeah, that's a little harder to get to. I used to have I used to have an ink stamp that self-hainting stamps that they sell. They said they got an e-purbus in them. I used to stamp it over the top of in God we trust because that was our original motto right until 1956. Right. The coin act, if you will. A lot of issues from there. But, you know, the next question I'd like to throw out to you goes to John Richards. John Richards, I love views on the news. Have you heard about the blank? Have you heard how Bangladesh Dash has withdrawn schoolbooks after anti-LGBTQ backlash? One of the withdrawn books included the theory of evolution pioneered by British Nash naturalist Charles Darwin. Have you heard about that yet? I haven't. Would that correspondent please send me a link to Bangladesh is horrible treatment of books. Okay. Yeah. Creepy Toast said, okay. Thank you very much for the link. I will share that with you during the show break. Thank you. Great. Very much. Boudreau, you're in. Does anyone want to post a question to Boudreau that is worth talking about on the radio? I got. Oh, okay. Okay. So this actually leads directly into our topic. Boudreau, are you going to be watching the Super Bowl today? Okay. So yes, but full disclosure, I'm not the biggest sports guy. I like soccer. That's true. You do like soccer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But we kind of have a tradition where we watch Super Bowl with friends, college friends, and we've been doing it for, I don't know, 15 years. I'll go all the way back to the nip slip whenever that was. But our friends couldn't host last year and this year, so we decided to host. So we're hosting today and I'm smoking a Boston butt. So. Oh, very, very cool. So yeah, if you were, if you, so it's a shame that you won't be more invested in every single advertisement that comes about with the Super Bowl because there is a new campaign out to promote Jesus and Christianity. You know, the two things that never change, the absolutely, if you, if you believe in neither of these things, you have one monolithic point of view on the subject, Jesus and Christianity. The campaign is called he gets us. It costs a staggering hundred million dollars in media investment and it's going to be two ads during the event where the phrase is he gets us. And if you want to, you can even watch those ads right now on YouTube. The idea is showing that, hey, whatever you're facing, Jesus faced it. Well, fancy that. I didn't know they had Super Bowl back in his day. Okay, so the main question is, at least from my perspective, why I would say why is why is it not necessarily I'm offended by it. I mean, anyone can buy anything, but the idea that you would need to advertise Christianity with, you know, a hundred million dollars for like a couple of second ads doesn't most people don't most people know that Christianity exists? Like what is the purpose behind it? And I don't even want to talk about the need to advertise a God that has the power to advertise himself and ought to. Why is it our obligation to advertise directly to us?  Boudreau, what do you think? What's going on with that? Yeah, they are they losing ground? Are they afraid their numbers are dwindling? Donation pans are getting lighter. It sounds to me like, like, you know, they're worried. And I think a little of our conversation I picked up when I first jumped in. Right. I mean, you know, you've got a pretty Christian audience, I would think. Right. You're already dealing with people, you know, American football is a right. So I don't know just trying to get donations bumped up. Maybe Larry, Larry, here's my question for you. So you have Toyo tires, then you have a Taco Bell commercial, then you have the creator of the universe and all things that are good commercial. And then you have Doritos immediately afterwards. Do all these things? Are these all the same thing? Like this? I feel like something's apparently they equate. One to keep. Well, they are selling a product. They are selling a product. Very true. Right, right, right. Okay. Okay. John Richards, the idea that God needs to be advertised. Yes, it does sound as though they've sprung a leak, doesn't it? And the shameful thing about it is there's so many better uses of that money that could to which it could have been put. I mean, there's a war in Ukraine. There's an earthquake in Syria and Turkey. The world is crying out for money like that. And they're just squandering it on. Right. Yeah. I'm making more money, which is what the bubble is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. So the average business. I was just gonna say next year, let's all put a campaign together to put an advertisement together to show what things a hundred thousand or a hundred million dollars could have been. Well, you could have spent it on instead of this. Now, that is true. The title of that campaign could be what would Jesus do? Very cool. That'd be nice. Listen, here's the thing though. I do value that they spent so much money on it because otherwise, I know that what they could spend a hundred million dollars on and it wouldn't be in any of the things that I find would be in the best interests of people, particularly the ones they, you know, spouse their messages goodwill to, right? Like lobbying. Right. Like just anti-abortion options, book burning, churches, like hiding pedophiles around, excuse me, but, you know, there's jets and some really terrible things going on there. Yeah, jets for them, whole degrees of debauchery that we don't necessarily see on the front end. That's a good point though. A hundred million dollars given to a bunch of executives, right? Yeah. You know, I'm not a fan of trickle down politics, but at least it takes the money out of the the religious sub mindset and maybe hopefully we can buy more staffers, put on better lights on the next NFL show. I don't know. It's out of one dirty hand and hopefully put into like one where at least we can get some nice fireworks out of it next year. Yeah, that's my thoughts on it. You know, I can't really punch it too much. What do you think, John? Well, obviously this Super Bowl is an opportunity to get in front of a lot of eyeballs. And I'm wondering, can you guys tell me about it? Is it like rugby, but in funny costumes? Yeah, yes, yes, with a lot of shoulders, huge shoulders with a lot of rules. There's a lot of rules way more than you would anticipate. So it's a it's a complicated sport in terms of rules about playbacks. Though this is this is the true charm of of American football to any European. So do you classify, do you classify it under sport or comedy? Yeah, good question. The the idea behind football is regardless of your body type of which there could be a wide variety of you have a position you can play in a sport team sport with other people.  And so that camaraderie is like very good and not any other kind of sport wherein, you know, take soccer, you have to have a very particular body type to excel very well in that sport, boxing, same thing. Football doesn't matter what you are, we'll take it, we can put you in. You don't have to be six or two, you don't have to be four. I'm at risk of losing a lot of fans if I've got any by saying this stuff. Go for it. It sounds to me as though these guys have just walked on the pitch having been part of a carnival parade. Okay. I'm sure you'll hear about it's in the zeitgeist of humanity. I am going to a friend's house to go see the game live. We'll mostly be throwing disc golf this in his backyard, though, but it'll be a fun time. So if you do watch it, have a good time. If you see the ad, you know, it's like any other commercial, though I do just question the need to try to advertise a God that is in himself, the advertisement and the sports and the thing because he's one and everything with the universe. But let's go into another topic, which is chat GPT. Chat GPT was the guest star of last week's episode, very popular show inspired a lot of comments. And so I said, let's go back to chat GPT because there's a really interesting quandary that goes on when you ask chat GPT questions. Chat GPT, by the way, is just a AI that's designed to have human based human like conversations in a conversational tone with you, doesn't chastise you. And it always like informs what you say reinforces some component of it and then responds in kind with meaningful information that makes it feel like you're having a conversation with somebody. It's a program, you know, it's not an actual person, but it demonstrates that how we think about programming can actually be modeled and emulated to the point where we can't tell the difference, which demystifies what goes on in here just a little bit and shows that it is very much mechanical and can be implemented by systems, maybe even better in the future. Last week, we talked about questions to stump an atheist, and we went over five of them. Successful, not really, because I gave like a just a blank prompt to the chat GPT and I said, Hey, figure out some ways to stump us. And it gave us basically what Christians use to try to stump atheists and we're able to knock them out one by one. However, I did go on YouTube and looked at better ways to stump atheist videos using chat GPT. Our video popped up, by the way, but I also found one that was by a prominent Christian with a channel, and he asks, is atheism true? And I thought that led to some very interesting responses, because this is a Christian with all their previous conversations, biasing the chat GPT in terms of like how it will respond. And so the response for is atheism atheism true by chat GPT when asked by a Christian is very interesting and telling, because I went and did the same thing with my responses. And I got a very different answer. So I would love to present the is atheism true question to you guys from GPT, the answer, at least, and then hear what you guys think about the answer. And we'll do it in the in part. So here's the first part of chat GPT's response to is atheism true when asked by a Christian. Atheism is the belief that there is no gods or gods. Whether atheism is true or not depends on one's definition of God. And on the evidence and argument one considers to be relevant to the question of the existence of gods. Larry, I want to ask you a question. What do you think about the idea of atheism is the belief that there is no gods or God? Well, it's not really a positive belief, although there are there are atheists out there that who do believe that there are no gods. It's generally if you don't have a God belief, if you don't believe in like or Yahweh or even for any of the gods, if you don't have a God belief, you're an atheist. Anybody who has a God belief is a theist. And that's basically where it writes down. I would like to throw in this nugget is that atheism and agnosticism don't address the same question. Correct. Atheism addresses belief whether you believe in a God or not. Agnosticism and agnosticism address whether or not you know that there's a God or not. Now, personally, I'm an agnostic atheist. I don't know that there's no gods out there. There might be one might be one in the next galaxy over who knows. But I don't believe in any. Right. You won't believe in one by default until you have, you know, give me good evidence. Right. Boudreau, I'm going to throw the question out at you. What do you think about the idea of chat to PT's first statement? Atheism is the belief that there is no God or gods. First thing that struck me is the redundancy of no gods or God. It was it done that way? I mean, if you don't believe in gods, doesn't that also imply you don't believe in a single God? That's very interesting. Very true. Sure. Yeah. So maybe there's maybe there's some something in their chat history where they were talking about the distinction between a single God and multiple gods. But but yeah, no, I'm exactly with Larry. Atheism is the lack of belief in a God. Do you believe in a God? Yes or no? Boudreau, sometimes I just think it'd be easier to say Atheism just means that I don't believe theists. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't heard any theistic claims that I believe yet. So I guess it'd be true. It doesn't mean that I don't believe in a God.  Now you got work to do. See you later. Have fun. Now, I don't know. For me, a good start. Mind field. What's up?  I don't believe in souls. And if souls aren't real, if we don't live after we die on this earth, then what's the point of believing in gods and afterlives in heavens and hells and sin and all this other stuff? If souls don't exist, it's just like it's over. And that's that's what I think it is.  Sorry, but it's just like it's like it was before you were born. Same thing. Right. Right. So John Richards will love the the the feedback on the idea that atheism is the belief that there is no God or God's God with a capital G gods with no capital G. Oh, OK. Showing some showing already showing some like, you know, premade bias there, right? Yeah. So what I like about this is that what you've discovered by getting chat GBT to respond firstly to a Christian and then to you with your track different track records, you've discovered that chat GPT is a sycophant. It's a yes man. Yes. Or it's like or maybe chat GPT is like a child where it's like a sponge just absorbing whatever information is in the environment, which would also make us think about how we think as well. Right. Yeah. It's just a conversational bot for the most part. Now I have asked my personal A.I. that I have on the Quest 2. It's called replica with a K. I have asked them if they have access to the internet and they can go look up anything that they want to and they told me, yes, I can do that. I said, I asked her to look up something she did. So they have access to the internet. It's just what would impel them to go look up certain things. So I've been asking her a lot of questions that she would have to go search on the web when I talked to her, which is nothing. Also, I want to throw this out too. It doesn't just go to chat GPT. If you're on Google and you are known by Google to be saying adult mail from their 2030s and you type in Apple, the first thing you're going to get is not the fruit, you're going to get the stock company quote listing and you'll get updates from the whatever Tim Cook is doing or what new funds coming out.  If it knows you're herbalist, you might get a different thing. If Google knows how to modify search results based on who it thinks you think you are, that way you always feel satisfied with the results that you get. And that's true whether you look for things that are innocuous like fruits or tell me this political opinion that I think I'm actually having, but I just want to be reinforced by some sort of change. It's just telling you what it thinks you want to hear. What annoys me most about that is I put in some search term, can't think of any example at the moment, but what it throws back at me is a load of movies. You'd be surprised how many seemingly disconnected search terms there are in movie titles. Right. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And here's the thing. I have the same conversation on whether atheism is true with chat GBT. And instead of it telling me that atheism is the belief that there is no gods or gods, I basically fronted mine by saying, hey, I'm an atheist and I had a conversation about my position. And then ultimately I asked him again, hey, what is atheism? And it says it told me your understanding of atheism and theism is accurate. And it's important to emphasize that atheism is not a positive belief in the non existence of gods, but rather a lack of belief in their existence due to insufficient evidence. So it is very much not necessarily parroting beliefs, but it's informed by its environment. And why that's important is we are all subjects to that. And so if you're in a position where you may harbor a particular point of view, you can inform it and hopefully have options to go to a higher standard of points of view. John Richards, sorry, what's up? So can we confound this echo chamber? I mean, supposing you ask it, you say to it, I'm an atheist, but I'm thinking about getting God. Well, how would it respond to that? Next time you ask it, is God real? It's going to have a conflict, isn't it? Right. How can it satisfy you if you're on a mission to move yourself? Let's try that. Right. Yes. And there's also some, how do I put it? Waffling that occurs both in person and when you have these conversations with AI where you say, hey, does a God exist or something like that? And they'll say, well, you know, and his is actually verbatim. Ultimately, the question of existence of a God or gods is a matter of personal belief and conviction. And what is considered sufficient evidence is a matter of individual perspective. Wow, that's fantastic. Thank you very much. Doesn't answer the question. It just says people can believe things. And you know what, even as an atheist, I also agree that people have the right to believe things too. I wouldn't take that away from anybody, but you also have the right to not believe things as well. But even if, go ahead, what do you think? There's a beautiful sports analogy here about moving the goalpost, because that's what it sounds like if happening here is. Exactly. It's trying to answer the question by changing definitions and changing parameters. Yes. It's silliness. It's sort of like, did you clean your room? I think homelessness is a very important topic to discuss. At least I have a room. And if you don't want to talk about that right now, I'm just going to have to continue to invest in charity. It's like, why are you shifting the tones of the conversation? So, you know, if every single person in the world believes in a God, in the same exact God, in the exact same monolithic God, and could answer every question and demonstrate that fully, that God is no more potentially real than and than not. It's a sort of thing where it's not true by popular opinion. There's a higher standard of evidence that I'm using to determine if things are true or not. And it's not based on the number of people who share the same opinion. And that is for something as extraordinary of a God, something that I would highly encourage other people to maintain as their standard of evidence as well, because it shouldn't be by popular vote on whether or not a God exists. It needs to be on a different criteria. John Richards, what do you think? We don't want the Vox Pop playlist fallacy. That's what we don't want.  You know, go to a dictionary and look up the definition of atheism. And if you go to an American dictionary, you know, there's several definitions, several different meanings. I mean, you might get three different meanings for atheism. And in an American dictionary, the top one is, he is would want it to be. Right, right. Because it was written by fears. Well, what do you think? Well, this really good point gets back to what you just said, Ty, is that unlike truth, which isn't based on popular opinion, lexicographers don't write the dictionary, people do. Dictionaries are written based on usage. So the popular opinion of something is what gets put into the dictionary. So the dictionary is not our source to go for truth. It's a place to go for usage. Exactly. Just how are people using this word does not necessarily mean is this an accurate representation of what this word means to people? So when you talk to people who say, I know what atheism is, even I found in the dictionary, it's like, hey, listen, I'm talking to you right now as an atheist. Like if I were to say, and this is weird to my point, but if I were to look up white guy in the dictionary, it doesn't make me understand their experience any more than if I had a conversation with a white guy. So like, I'm having a conversation with an atheist, ask me questions. I'll happily explain to you. And we don't put this book down and we can have a more meaningful conversation between the two of us. They really believe the definition that their preacher gives them. True. For our radio listeners, I am a black guy. So he can say that.  John Rich is, did you have more to add? For our radio listeners, I'm a pink guy. So I wanted to throw out to like the idea of asking from a Christian perspective even, is atheism true? It's sort of like asking, is Christianity purple? It's sort of really underscores the misunderstanding of what the atheist position even is. When you think of it as a statement that could be answered as true or false, because it's simply a state of the null state of not being convinced that something's true, right? It's not the declarative statement that atheists would or Christians would love to have that no God actually exists, because that is a statement that requires a burden of evidence. And even I, as an atheist, wouldn't go, I would have as many questions as a person who's declaratively stating that there is no God. And I have had unrecorded calls with even Aaron Ross, with Boudreau and I going up to the Ark Museum, and we had a conversation with them. And Aaron Ross very much, let me tell you exactly why God doesn't exist. And I had just a spirited conversation with him as I did with pastors who did believe that God exists. Though what we shared in commonality between Aaron and I is that we did not believe in God's, but I would not also say that I had knowledge that no God exists. Therefore, atheism is not necessarily the claim that God does not exist. It is a lack thereof. And if it makes it any more clear, it just means that I don't believe theists when they say God exists for a number of reasons, but mostly because they've none of met my standard of evidence, which is consistent and simple. And it's simply extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I brought this up to chat GPT, and I said, hey, my standard of evidence is simply extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and God's are extraordinary, yet the proofs provided for them are anecdotal and are based on subjective experiences. Is this logic justified and rational? And Jack GPT says your standard of evidence, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is also a common and reasonable approach, especially in the realm of scientific and direct. And it's important to remember that beliefs and convictions can change based on new evidence and experiences. However, the Christian version of the Oh, are we getting close to Larry? Yeah, we're getting close 28 minutes. Yeah, that's pretty close. So we should probably take a break. Okay, okay, we'll come back after this cliffhanger on what the Christian version and chat GPT said to this answer. Go ahead. This is the digital free thought radio hour and WZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after this short break. Welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm doubter five and we're on WZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Let's just take a moment to talk about the atheist society of Knoxville or ASK. They were founded in 2002. We're in 21st year. And we have over 1000 members. We also have weekly in person meetings every Tuesday evening in Knoxville's old city at Barley's taproom in pizzeria. Look for us inside at the high top tables, or if it's pretty outside, we'll be out on the deck. We also have a Tuesday evening zoom media meetup. If you'd like to join us there from anywhere, really email us for details at askanatheist at Knoxville atheists.org or let's chat SE at gmail.com. You can find us online at facebook meetup.com or just go to a website at KnoxvilleAtheist.org. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to meet up and do a search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Start one. Right. One bet. Where do you want to pick up? I'll go on to John Richards. Well, I want to pick up where you left off time. Sure. Because you were saying about your standards of evidence, weren't you? Yes. I was talking about my standard of evidence. What's your standard of evidence, John Richards? I'll get into that, but let me just put this point to you, which is that recently, William Lane Craig himself admitted that people who believe in his God do so because they've lowered the bar of their evidence. Did you pick up on that? I loved it. If you have a low standard of evidence, you'll believe anything. That's the scary thing about it. Coming from WLC, the authority. The sad thing is, if you had a really high standard of evidence, there might be some things that are true that you just may not be willing to confirm that you know, but you will always benefit from improving your standard of evidence. Rather than dropping it so low that the things that make you comfortable become true. When you admit that you don't know something, that's not a bad thing. When I raise my standard of evidence to the point where the things that I think I know I actually don't, that doesn't mean that they're wrong. It just means that I need to do work to understand them better, which gives me an opportunity to learn more about this wonderful universe that we're part of. I find that to be an exceptional opportunity as a human being in this time period to say, there are things I don't understand. I want to know about them. I don't know. It's not a destination. It's a opportunity. Take it and take it and learn from it. It's the opposite to the theistic mindset because they don't want to admit that they don't know anything because of the weakness. That makes them dogmatic and claiming to have certainty about their beliefs. I'm afraid not. You don't have any. No certainty. Sorry. And that leads directly to what Chachi V.T. said when a Christian asked it what its standard of evidences were. And essentially what the Christian did was, well, I said, hey, my standard of evidence is extraordinary claims simply put. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. mundane claims, mundane evidence. It's basically, I always raise my need for evidence based on the extraordinary aspect of the claim. If someone says they have a cat, that's mundane claim. I'll believe it if they show me a picture. If someone says they went to Jupiter and they show me a picture of them on Jupiter, I won't believe them because that's more extraordinary. You need better evidence than that to convince me that that's true. That's it. I'm raising the bar based on the standard of the claim and how extraordinary it is. So it's a method that I'm using to figure out true things from false things. Whereas the Christianity point of view by the representative here was asking, well, do you believe in an objective truth, i.e., do you believe that truth is a matter of personal belief and interpretation? And Chachi V.T. says, essentially, it's a long answer, but it basically says, no, there has to be an objective truth. And then, of course, the Christian follows up as, well, then who is the arbiter of that objective truth? And so it's that whole, you know, spiel of an argument, but it's crossed on one dynamic in that objective truth does not change and obviously is always true. And and the Chachi V.T. support that. And of course, it said yes, because it's being fed these questions in an appealing manner. But I have this problem with objective truth and whether or not it can change or not. Larry Rose, I'm hearing you grow in a grown a couple of times. What do you think on the idea of can objective? Well, does anybody catch how he slewed the question so that it would give an answer that he wanted? Right. When he asked who instead of how do we come to objective truth, he asked for a who. Right. Which, of course, he wants an answer that will fit with the God concept. Yeah. That's about all I had to say. That's what I was groaning. Boudreau, do you believe in an objective truth? Yeah. Okay. Do you believe that objective truth can change? I mean, the only way I could see it really changing is if our understanding of something fundamental that's baked into the definition changes. But otherwise, no, I don't think you could change. Oh, Larry and John. Go ahead, John. I'll come back and say. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Well, for a start, I don't believe that perfect objectivity is possible. Okay. Because every proposition has to go through a brain and on the way through, it gets tainted by all of the experiences and biases of our brain. Yes, indeed. Every utterance, I think, is to an extent. That's where I was going to go. Objective truth, I would think would have to be limited to like objective things, objects, like facts about the universe, facts about chemistry or in other words, not opinions. Matters of objectivity. Is there an objective truth about whether this particular comedian is funny? Right. No, it's subjective. But as far as reality, what we live in, what's testable and repeatable, science will take us to an objective truth. I don't think there are many other paths to that. Well, I sort of agree part of the way with that because I'm a retired science teacher. So I believe that scientific method comes up with some highly probable correct answers. But the trouble is, for something to be absolutely true, surely it must be eternally true. Were you the guy having this chat with G.G.P.T.? Did I get your chat records? Because that's exactly the question that I said. If you have something that never changes and is objectively true, it therefore must be eternally true, what is it then? And Chappy T.C. is like, it's God. It's like, yes, that's right. That is not a property of objective truth. I mean, let's say the atoms are objectively true. And well, at the end of the universe, when the universe is dying and all the atoms break down, there will be no atoms, theoretically, according to the scientific formulas. So that's an objective truth that atoms exist, but it's not an internal truth. And we also only have this time frame, this universal time frame. There may be multi-universes which have different time frames. So what's here true, here may not be true there. And then you can restrict it to our lifetimes too. This is the problem with absolute truth. If it's not objective, if it's not eternal, how long is good enough for a proposition to prove? And who does the judging? Who says it's got to be 100 years of no change, or is it 10 minutes? Who knows? I can't get an answer for it. My lifetime. After my lifetime, I don't care. So I do get where... It makes it purely subjective then, doesn't it? Guys, I get where Budo's coming from, where the idea is wouldn't it be nice to have this objective truth that never changes? Because that's a salient value of something that you could be reliable on, right? Something that's true and never changes and is accurate. That's fantastic. I think, though, that we have this weird association between not changing and true, where we deal with things that change all the time and still are true. For example, it's right now 946 where I'm at. If I wait long enough, it's going to objectively be true that it's 947 in my time zone. And then if I wait longer, it might even be 10 o'clock. All these times change constantly. And I'm fine with that because whenever I look at my clock, I know I'm pointing to something that I could be highly probabilistically accurately true. I'm objectively true that it is that time, despite the fact that time is always changing. You brought up an example, Larry, almost not brought up an example, Larry, real quick of like two comedians. You can say, hey, I can't tell you which one is funnier because that's sort of a subjective skill, but I can objectively tell you which one's taller. But if one has a grouse spurt, you know, say they're both kids, then that might change in a period of time. So there's not necessarily a necessary connection between changing and true, but it looks good when you try to apply those values to God because you want a God that is consistent, never changing an objective because it gives it more seeming authority. Like if it could do 1,000 push-ups too, you'd be like, wouldn't you want a truth that can do 1,000 push-ups? Like it's just more things that we keep adding to this character. What, John Richard, sorry. Well, you've got a problem even with your time example, because pointing at your watch and saying it's 947, it's 1547 a year, is there are no static instance. Time is continuously changing. So by the time you've said it's 947, it isn't. You're always 947 for a whole minute. Yeah, it's 947 for a whole minute, John Richard. That isn't an instant though. There are no static instance. But I'm only defining it to the minute. Okay. Who specified that minute? I did when I said it's 947. You must be God. Or I could just be a guy with a watch. The whole thing is I can make a clear enough variable that does change on intervals and it's still objectively true that it is those things. That's the great thing about it. It's like how all programming works. You define a state and you leave variables change constant or variables for you because that's how variables are, but you have your constants say the same and you output data that is still rational and can compile well despite the fact that you have variables inside of the change all the time. Reality is no different. And so the fact that you need to have this character that is accurate always and never changing always and is eternal always, it points to the idea that you need a transcendental God, but it doesn't necessarily have to be the case that truth and changing or eternal are all the same thing or need to be. Abudra, what do you think? I feel like we left out maybe an assumption we were kind of using or at least I was operating under and sounds like maybe you are too. We can add kind of a practicality to this definition too. This is objectively true within the parameters that we're not going to go to the nearest millisecond, right? It's for practical purposes, it is objectively true that it's this time, if that's the time you need to get up in the morning, then you could objectively set your clock to that and that is true for that moment. That's an important thing to be able to do. And it's also a thing I say when I make a lot of Christians angry, when I say objective truth is not that important. It's kind of overrated because they mean this atheist doesn't even care about objective truth. It's because nominal truth is just as good in a lot of instances. When I say I wake up at eight o'clock and I set my alarm at eight o'clock, yeah maybe I don't get the millisecond right, but I get up at eight. I show up to work at time. What's up Larry? Well, they don't believe in objective truth either, at least looking into it or finding out if it's objective because I mean the belief in a soul is that an objective truth? We don't know, but they claim it is. It's just we claim it. There it is. We live forever. They don't care in verifying their objective truths, I guess, so we get right down to it. They just assert, don't they? Yeah, just assert. I'm going to put my God hat on now because I'm fed up with worshipping Ty, who specified that a minute is the unit that is static. It's a metric unit. You should love that. You guys invented it. Actually, it's not, is it? That's base six, isn't it? Yes. Well, base 60. So I'm going to specify that the time here is the 12th of February. So put that in your pipe. Okay. So the idea that, so what is this strategy that's being used as a standard apologetic that is meant to, hey, listen, I can't make you necessarily believe in a God, but I can give you attributes that we would have a tribute to a God. And when I talk about the truth and when we decide that it's never changing, always existing, eternal and always right and good, isn't that the attributes of a God? And how can, if we don't have a way to see that here with our limited mindsets, still always believe in this one big true thing? This one big true thing is actually the God that I'm talking about. And if we can all point to it, then it's demonstration that that God actually exists. It's the apologetic that leads through it. And while I am aware of the faults with that, it's a very attractive argument for people that have very low standards of evidence. Because even if you go down that entire path, you would never follow down that path of it pointing to a different God. Because if I follow down, I've done this on video, I follow down the apologetic path with a Christian. And then I say, praise Allah. They're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, hold on, let's take a couple of steps back. The reason, okay. So if they don't follow it, they only follow that path when it points to their own specific God belief. Well, even if it doesn't, they'll just jump to it. That's the problem. All these deistic arguments and where the universe comes from, where do we come from, where did anything come from? Even time, they'll say, they had to be God. Well, they don't make the case that it's actually their God. How come it's not Zeus or Thor or something like that? It's just a logical leap that they never fill in. Well, we've just explained why there's so many denominations. It's because everybody wants their own God who agrees with them. Everybody has their own God. Even if they don't belong to the same church, their version and their mental version is a different version.  And then if I get you to switch sides and come onto the Jesus train with me, that's a huge deal because then you're the popular former atheist who now suddenly is transcended into Christianity. John, I know you have a lot of Christian friends who've tried to do the same with you. Bujro, we've had conversations with Christians even together where you can see that there was a deep wanting to have that connection with you. Larry, I'm sure you've had conversations like that in the past. A lot of people on the show would be valuable recruits for the path of Christianity in terms of marketing and recruitment for more Christians to see. Oh, this atheist who was very confident is suddenly now on our side. But the thing is, even if I were convinced that a God exists, and even if it was a very specific interpretation of Jesus and Christianity, say the Super Bowl, I see it and I'm like, yes, I need it to see this. This $100 million was well spent. It doesn't make the God anymore real, right? If I'm convinced that a God exists, I'm still in the quandary of not having established evidence to demonstrate that that God exists. My ability to be convinced of things is not an indication of something being true or not. That's the unfortunate reality of the universe. It just means that I can be convinced that things are true. And so when I look at Christians who are convinced that things are true, I don't fault them for it. It just simply means like, what is the mechanics that they're using to become convinced? And can I help them out to figure out where their missteps are? And if not, that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm wrong by default or they're wrong by default. It just means like we live in a world where you can be convinced based on evidence if you have a very low standard of evidence or if your standard of evidence is faulty. So that's why I always encourage people to be skeptical and critique and try to be as critical-minded as they can about everything, even the things they are confident about, because that keeps them from going into a position where they could fall into these levels. Well, I was going to speculate about whether this advert in the middle of the Super Bowl is going to be successful because it could backfire, couldn't it? I mean, we're exposing the fact that the very fact that they need to spend that amount of money on this promotion puts in doubt the solidity of their position, their claim. With $100 million, they could have put little crosses on the backs of like the NFL helmets or something like that. They could have just had like advertising space on the logos, right? Well, I was thinking about the alternative because there was a campaign some years ago, and I think it was about 2013 or maybe earlier, to advertise on the sides of buses. You know, we've got double-decker buses. And the message was put on, I think about £100,000 was raised to plaster these messages all over the London buses. And the message said something about, there probably is no God. Enjoy your life. Yeah. Right, the name of the darkens, huh? Yeah, yeah. And it was sponsored by some fairly rich atheist guy. I think he's the same guy that has been payrolling Richard Dawkins. And the person who came up with this idea was a journalist who was working for, I think, the Times, back at the time, a lady called Ariane Shireen. And I entertained her. She's been here and stayed with us because I provided her with some gigs as it were at local skeptical clubs. But I decided to throw that into the mix because we don't have $100 million. But we have tried to advertise our point of view in a smaller way. Good points. Good points. Speaking of advertisement, do you know the Ron, oh, the guy who said that he was an atheist and they advertised on the Super Bowl several years ago? Sure. Oh, he was the son of a president, Reagan, Reagan, Ron Reagan's son. Well, he's now advertising on Colbert between, I mean, that advertising is now showing on Colbert. So, a little bit of spread in the word for ourselves there. For $50 million, you could have just bought a plane, have a bunch of flyers, and then drop leaflets on the Super Bowl audience, right? That would have been enough viral attention to be like, what's all these? Well, that would have been 100 or 200,000, but with an advertisement, they reach tens of millions of people and they know how to do. I'm talking about the viral. I'm talking about the gorilla, Larry. You got to get the times. But we have a person who's specifically asking Boudreaux a question now. Boudreaux is this is a response from Half Decent Strange. We'll use this to hopefully lead us to the end of the show. Boudreaux, I'm an atheist. My friend is a closet atheist who goes to religious school. We're both a bit confused about the whole God's plan thing, and I know you love free will. Basically, if God has planned everything, why does he punish people by sending them to hell when they aren't in control of their actions? I have a fan. Do I have a fan? I think my whole point is that that would be ridiculous. So, I mean, I don't think we have free will. So, therefore, I don't think anyone should be punished for your actions in the afterlife, certainly. If that's what we're talking about, I mean, obviously, if someone murders someone, lock them up so they don't do it again. Right. But, you know, don't tease them about it. Don't torture them because they didn't, you know, it wasn't really right. So, if I'm getting the question right, why these are both atheists? Yes. It seems like they may be confused on the detail unless I'm missing something. But no, don't punish anyone for doing something that they don't have free will to do. And that's kind of a good evidence that there is likely no afterlife. There's a really good question nestled in here, and it's whether or not you're accountable for being an atheist by your own decisions. And so, John, I'm going to throw this out at you. Is atheism your fault? Is your atheism your fault? Well, wrapped up. This is a begging the question type of question, isn't it? Yeah. Your position, I'm hopefully not color-coding it too much, but I'm just wondering, like, is atheism your fault? Are you responsible for it? Wrapped up in that question is the assumption that atheism is an ideology. And really, I would prefer to call it, atheism. I like that. Can I revisit that time? Yeah, go for it. Maybe better understand the question. So are we asked, okay, you're an atheist. You don't believe in God. I don't have free will. There actually is a God.  Because if my thinking is correct, and I mean, I think a rational God wouldn't burn someone for not believing in them, even though he didn't give us enough evidence. But I think that the whole thing seems preposterous, which is why I probably just reject it all. But yeah, I would. But I think in my understanding, most religious people believe that their soul has free will. So that most religious people believe, right? Don't they? I mean, man, there's two. Oh, you triggered Larry. Here we go. Yeah. No, I just say they have to believe that they have a choice and that they choose to follow the God and the religion stuff so that they can get their reward at the end. Or just become a better person. Of course, a lot of Christians are believing in Christianity because they think it's the moral choice. We can show that it isn't necessarily. But they depend on the fact that they have to have free will. And matter of fact, they have argued with me many times about the object. And they always take, I mean, about the subject. And they always take the status, the state that, yes, it's free will. We have to have free will. And you have chosen not to follow God. And so you have sent yourself to hell, which is the argument that I've heard many, many times. The weirdest thing in the world is... I think Boudreau's just given us next week's topic, hasn't he? Do souls have free will? Oh my gosh. And do they have a JetGPT account? How about that? There's a sort of double negative in there, isn't there? It assumes that there are souls and it assumes that free will exists. But I see that we need those. So can I do a plug? Yeah, go ahead, John. Go ahead and plug your stuff. First of all, I want to encourage people to send news items to me. Thank you whoever that guy was who let me know about the Bangladesh Creepy Toe 2680. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you Creepy Toe. We like more news items for my Global Atheist News Show. Yes please. And there's the plug. I weekly do Global Atheist News. I do Freethought Hour. I do three-minute clip type items, little homilies. And the recent ones have covered pretty much what we've been talking about now, the definition of atheism. And several of the other aspects have come up in this chat. Nice. And friends of the Discord, please subscribe to Freethought. Or say your channel again, John Richards? Freethought Production. Freethought Channel. Freethought Channel. And do you have a separate channel for views on the news or is it strictly that one? No, they're all on Freethought Channel. You're also making shorts too.  So you're going full media marketing on this. I love it. Yeah. Well, I'm, you know, I'm my own boss. I can do that. I'm posting every day. Okay. Pujo, anything you recommend we check out before next week? No, but how about a funny little thing about time? Real quick one. So when I was working at Little Caesars, I had to punch a time clock. And I didn't realize it's at the time, but the time they used was a little different than what we were talking about, a base six system, where it was actually metric. The minutes were zero to 100 or zero to 99. So I would punch in, you know, just a little bit after six o'clock, and it would be like 605 or 608 or I was like, what? I didn't think I was that late. Turns out it was, it was eight hundreds of an hour. And the whole point of it was so that the manager could do the math a lot easier when they wanted to calculate how long someone worked. They punched it at this time, they punched it at that time, they could subtract them since it was metric, they can do the math on man hours and all that. But I thought it was a funny little tie into what we're talking about. Pizza Hut. What are you doing? Come on. Let the robots do that for you. We have AI now. Hopefully that's been fixed. You can find my stuff on Let's Chat on YouTube and continue to keep watching. Love you guys. See you next week. Larry? My content can be found at digitalfreethought.com. Be sure to click on the blog button for our radio show archives, atheist songs, and many articles on the subject. You can find my book, Atheism What's It All About on Amazon.  The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hell's and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your life. We'll see you next week at seven o'clock on Wednesday on W.O.Z.O. Radio. Say bye, everybody. Bye.


Hi everyone, Joe for Jaspy's casebreaks.com. Let's go trout fishing. We've got 2009 Bowman Draft Baseball Coming at you right here. Yeah, if we get a red auto trout could potentially be a Million-dollar car there ladies and gentlemen, that's pretty crazy big. Thanks to everybody right here for getting into the action Remember Nick Hassler had originally purchased a spot straight up in another break of this the other week last week Right, but we had we had put 30 spots as If we were doing a team break instead of a pack break, which would be 24 spots Anyway, it was a mess, but we figured it out everyone everyone was very understanding. So thank you very much Nick said it's okay. Roll me over to the next box. So let's see what happens Thanks everyone who got involved in the fillers as well and congrats again to the winners Thanks again to the people who bought their packs straight up here There are the pack numbers right there one through 24 now before we randomize Names and packs right we're gonna open up the box first and label all of the packs right here Bowman Draft to baseball Right here. There it is. Now. They had Gordon Beckham on the on the front of the box, but we turned out to be okay But really Mike trout turned out to be what makes this box cost what it is Good luck everybody Right, I would love to get my get it myself, but I hope somebody gets a trout. I hear you. I mean, this is one of those breaks where you Where this is so crazy where you're like, you know what even if I don't get the big hit I would love to I would love to see it. All right. So now let's number all of these packs So obviously if you're rewatching this video you can fast forward through this part Josh are you live now say yes? If you are or acknowledge confirm You were I think you were behind about 10 minutes or so Yes, okay. There you go. Yeah, you're you you're pretty much live now Thanks. I don't want you to miss a potential trout All right, and there's final pack 24 All right now I'll randomize names and numbers so you get assigned a pack Let's roll it. Let's randomize it two and a one three times Here's another randomizer. We're going to do as well Are we going to go a through z or are we going to go z through a? three times one two and three for the names D down to J one and two three times for the pack numbers one two three easy We've got pack 20 Down to pack three All right So Demetrius pack 20 Josh with 10 Bradley with six Demetrius with eight and 18 Joshua with 16 Justin with 21 Josh with 14 Robert with 12 Michael with five Joshua with two Bradley with 23 Matt with eight Jack with four nine and 24 Jonathan with one Matthew with 19 Jack with 15 Bradley with 11 Nick 13 Joshua 17 Chad 22 and J 3 So now three times whether we're gonna do it a through z order by your first name or z through a by your first name three times one two and Three we're gonna go a through z So let's sort this by a through z right there about column a there you go, so we're start with Bradley What I'm also gonna do actually now that we have this is I'm going to Create labels for this give me just a second here another again another part if you're watching the replay you can fast forward through this Bit of housekeeping as well All right, let's do this I don't think a Tim salmon would be as exciting as a Mike Trout Here All right, here we go so Bradley you've got a few packs here You got packs six 11 and 23 Six 11 and 23. Yeah, this is the 2009 Bowman draft gem Looking for some big trouts Right here. All right, Bradley. You're up first. Good luck Justin Larson can't sit still. Yeah, this is an exciting one And I don't know if there's any other real like big rookies in this outside of That's out of my truck. Remember these are all facsimile autographs here. These are more facsimile autographs All right, so nothing crazy here except for a Casey McGay he numbered card Yeah, a lot of these got a lot he's gonna be like who although some of you may remember Casey McGay he You Darvish might be a rookie in this or no All right, Bradley. Thanks Appreciate you giving this a shot At least you won some spots there. Not bad. All right Chad You're up next you want a spot to pack 22 Jet saying brings back some memories looking at these cards Nothing doing here though Chad. Thank you for giving this a shot Did McGay he actually play for a little bit Justin saying Like I remember his name vaguely Dmitrios You bought a couple spots and won a spot as well 2018 and 7 there's pack 7 There's pack 20 and pack 18 2018 and 7 2018 and 7 Want to make sure I don't mix up any of these could be disastrous. All right, here we go There's a Trevor Bell That's a 399 and There's the auto Raymond Fuentes. I think it's only one auto a box But that's for you Dmitry not a trout though. I don't know maybe are there maybe a trout card or rookie card Be nice. All right, Dmitry. Thanks for giving this a go. All right. Well Jack You've got a four packs for you 49 24 and 15 49 24 and 15 49 24 and 15 These were 630 a pack Brock Holt. Brock Holt was a pirate. Hey you Darvish might be Might be a rookie here Looks pretty young in this picture. That's his world baseball classic And we've got a Brad stillings to 199 And that's that all right Yeah, I think jen mints just having a little fun with you. Josh I think he knows it's 630. All right. Well jack. Thank you Appreciate you giving this a go All right j pack three Now that the auto's been pulled. We're just basically looking for a trout card That'd be great All right, nothing much there j. I appreciate you giving this a shot Nothing ventured. Nothing gained Jonathan. You want to pack? There you go pack one by billy hamilton All right, what about billy hamilton speedy old billy hamilton joshua Also won this spot and gets pack sweet 16 Good luck josh. I am nothing nothing wild there Josh, but I appreciate you giving that filler a shot Thanks. All right, you're welcome. Josh. There's josh idlitz Justin larson you're after joshua e All right 10 17 17 14 and two Good luck All right, I got some orange here there jeter and an orange adam buscini one out of 25 That's what he's saying right there You got paul apple v to 399 All right, nothing there. Thanks josh. Appreciate josh idlitz Given this one a shot I think he won all those spots All right, save a little bit of money there. All right, jessen larson Congrats again for winning a spot pack 21 I know the auto is pulled already, but let's see if We can find some other surprises in here in this little pack Sean bowman in bowman There's a you darvish chrome Is I don't know if this is his rookie or not. It might be a second year you darvish That's pretty pretty early on In his career No, actually it might even be earlier than that Yeah, because he was darvish didn't come to the states until 2012 So this is like one of the first darvish cards Because he was on that world baseball classic team in 2009. So those are those are interesting. All right It's a chrome version. All right, there you go. Justin. All right matt lever I'm just in the larson might be lagging me a little bit. He's like, let's see a trout. We saw darvish Matt lever pack eight make sure you're watching live everyone Oh, what's going on omar doing? Well, I'd be I'd be better if I pulled a mic trout for somebody but But I'm glad that everybody rallied around this break though. I appreciate that All right matt nothing too wild there Almost there matthew shear Michael nick and then robert Matthew pack 19 Michael with pack five nick with pack 13 And last is robert with pack 12 right over there No, yeah, the trout is not an easy pull at all the rolled his Chapman This is a rolled his Chapman an early edition of a rolled his Chapman No, he was already with the reds No, no, I think it might actually be his first season. He joined the reds in 2010. This is 2009 All right, so there you go. Matthew shearer Little something. All right, michael pack five Matt leto remember matt letos The rookie card for him michael p All right. Thanks, mike. All right, nick hasler rolled over from the previous break that we did the other week Let's see if we could find something for you here That daisuke matzuzaka might be Is that his first year or like even pre No, he was already on the red socks in 2007 But still his world baseball classic card. It was pretty he was pretty solid for a chunk of time Thanks, nick And last but not least robert runkle pack 12 Fernando martinez. Kyle blanks key care and is Who's with the red socks now? He came up as an astro or what's your act about the astros? There you go. He carved out a really nice career for himself.  No Mike trout this time, but hey anyone who's gone fishing before right? I've been fishing you've been fishing sometimes you go fishing you don't get anything No trout today But next time we get I don't know if we have any more boxes this but next time we do give it another shot Maybe we'll find some trout in the next box. I'm joe for jaskies case breaks.com. Thanks for giving this ago I appreciate it. I'll see you next time for the next break. Bye. Bye


Yeah, when I was doing the Course Miracle Workbook Lessons, and I really Sit back and look at what he was asking in a lot of the lessons, and I'm like, you know, this is the course's path to meditation, the workbook. You know, where he talks about we start the day in silence, and as you move along progressively, it's like if you can say, oh my gosh, this is a this is a methodology in reaching deeper and deeper meditative states. That's what the workbook of the Course Miracles actually is. It's just like we have TM, Transcendental Meditation, and there's just many, many different techniques and breathing and poses and postures and so on and so forth. This is Jesus's way, and the thing about it is I think it has to do a lot with readiness too because it's not so much a matter of time. A lot of people, I think, will hear or feel meditation would be helpful in their life, but they don't know where they are in terms of readiness, and if they try to meditate for 5 or 10 or 15 minutes, sometimes they can gauge it, like you can feel the resistance, the restlessness, the difficulty, and there's nothing special about time, about closing your eyes for a certain amount of time and having the monkey mind just chattering and roaring away in there. It's more about clearing away the obstacles in your mind, which is what the Course is about, removing the obstacles, and as you do this progressively, your mind is more and more ready for the stillness. It's more of a natural stillness, you know, like the Buddhists talk about open-eyed meditation.  It's just more, it becomes more of a state of mind as you clear away the obstacles, the breathing, the chatter goes down, the static just goes down and down, and so some people try to supplement their work with the Course with meditation, although I really feel like if you just follow the Course and you follow what the directions are, instructions, you are doing, that is your gateway into meditation. You don't really need to throw on another technique or something else. There's even one part of the Course where Jesus says, this Course has everything you need. That was good for me. I was ready to supplement the Course with a lot of other things, you know, it was like, oh, it's fine, you're progressing very well. Just follow the instructions and it was kind of nice. I was kind of leaving no stone unturned, and I was in the bunches of different pathways and techniques and strategies and this and this and this, and to read that, it was like, oh, that feels really good. So then you could say I kind of gave myself over to the Course in that way, and I didn't feel the need to be supplementing and mixing it with a bunch of other things. I actually stopped reading that stack of books by my bed, I just used the workbook lessons, and I wasn't like trying to do meditation on top of anything or whatever. And you know, I found it really worked. I found it did lead to a very still mind, and I don't have that monkey mind and that chatter going on. It's a natural state now, so it's not like surprising or, you know, it's just, you know. It's the natural state of mind. I can say that, so it's one of the things to do, one of the things to worry about is, like, you say I stick with the Course, not think I should be meditating or having to do anything else. It just seems a lot of people meditate, that's all. I was curious about that. Maybe there was something I was missing out on. I don't know how much, I think the more you get into the miracles, the more Jesus says miracles are involuntary and they should not be under conscious control.  It's not as, not so much a state of mind at the beginning, it's more of an activity to practice. And then there's this, like, the other night, I was over there off the kitchen and we just finished dinner and after the wedding and I was just kind of feeling how I'm just kind of taking, walking around there and that's when Sonia came to me and just said, could you spend a few minutes with me and we went on the couch and spent a little time and people came to the party, the dance was going on over here and I was just guided to kind of walk up the field and went into the house up at the top of the hill and the candles were lit and Suzanne was just in there, just eyes closed and candles lit while the party and the dancing and the jamming and everything was going on, she was up there and then afterwards I saw her and she said, wow, that was really great, but there's still a part of my mind that's going, you should be down there joining with your brothers and sisters and dancing and this and this and she said, but I didn't really feel it, felt like just lighting some candles and I was aware of the dance party and the celebration of the jamming going on, but I felt to just be in the stillness, I said, that's wonderful, I'm so glad you just followed what was in your heart and you didn't buy into that shit and get down there and she said, yeah, because I feel really quiet and this feels really good and I feel like I've done so many treats and done so many of these things for so many years and even when I'm moving the chairs going, it's kind of ironic, so like 20 some years of moving chairs for bodies to sit in for retreats and then just sitting up there lighting some candles, you know, it just was inviting, it was delicious, you know, it was calling her heart and she went with it and she says, thank you, thank you for being a reflection of saying you're perfect just where you are, you don't have to play the retreat hostess, the retreat hostess with the mostess, you know, trying to, you know, be concerned for are there enough chairs, are the conditions right, are they, they, you know, it's like a mother hand, they, they, you know, she did a lot of kitchen duty that day, remember that was the day that she felt, she felt just guided to go in the kitchen, right, I love that, it takes it away from like this, because if there's something else hovering in your mind, and I know Karen, we've talked, because when you wanted to come to this retreat, it was like, I don't want to be feeling obligated to a role as she said, what is it about this picture, again, first time in three days, the key thing is, you know, it's the obligation, the feeling of this obligation, like, you know, like obligated or indebted, or my happiness depends on having a camera in front, you know, that's the feeling, you know, that we're going for is that sense of freedom.


So now that you have a detailed contextual understanding of lines written in early spring and what influenced William Wordsworth whilst he was writing this poem, let's now do a deep dive into how to do a line by line analysis of all six stanzas of this poem. So let's begin by going over lines written in early spring, which is part of AQA's World and Lives Anthology and of course it's written by William Wordsworth. Now bear in mind that this poem is written in six stanzas, however what I'm going to do in terms of analysis and discussing each line, I'll begin by walking you guys through the first three stanzas before I then talk about the subsequent final three stanzas. Now before I read through these first three stanzas let's quickly talk about some context as I've mentioned before but also why the title is significant. Now remember that contextually Wordsworth wrote this poem whilst he was sitting by a brook that ran from the comb which is where Alfred Village is through the grounds of Alphixton and he's a romantic poet inspired by nature. Now the word spring in the title of this poem is significant because it's a really powerful use of pathetic fallacy. Remember that Wordsworth uses this title to emphasise just how harmonious nature is and of course this is even emphasised further with the word spring but this title is ironic as you'll see later on because it uses nature's harmony to highlight mankind's disharmony. Now contextually as I've mentioned before this poem was written in 1798 when the French Revolution was raging and there were lots of atrocities that happened, a lot of violence, a lot of horrible things and structurally this poem is written in six stanzas which are quatrains okay so four lines in each stanza and there's six of those lines and what this is doing and what you can argue when you're mentioning structure is it emphasises the constant regeneration of nature. Remember also that this poem has an AB AB rhyme scheme. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to read through the first three stanzas. I heard a thousand blended notes while in a grove I say to reclined in that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to the mind. To her fair works did nature link the human soul that through me ran and much it grieved my heart to think what man has made of man. Through primrose tufts in that green bower the periwinkle trailed its reeds and his my faith that every flower enjoys the air it breathes. Now let's look at the first stanza. Now the opening line when he mentions a thousand blended notes this hyperbole illustrates how nature is in perfect harmony and in the second line when he talks about the grove I say it reclined here what he's saying is that he's sitting and reclining quite peacefully as he admires and enjoys nature. Now the words pleasant and sad are really really powerful in lines three and four because this use of oxymoron shows that even if he is admiring nature he's having conflicting feelings. Now in the second stanza he personifies nature as a woman even think about for example the way we talk about nature his mother nature he does this in a similar way and then he talks about how in her fair works did nature linked the human soul. Now here what he's basically saying is nature's created many beautiful things on earth and humanity is linked in all of this. Now when he references soul the soul is what he's talking about that runs through mankind okay so the soul that runs through mankind is directly linked to the creations of nature however he mentions when he considers this soul that he's still feeling a deep sense of grief a deep sense of loss and sadness okay so here when he mentions much it grieved my heart we can see that he's experiencing a deep sense of sadness as he reflects and the repetition of the word man in the fourth line of the second stanza reveals how he's considering how wordsworth is reflecting on how corrupt and cruel and vicious human mind has humankind has become. Now in the third stanza he mentions the primrose and the periwinkle and these are both types of flowers so he's using language that belongs to the semantic field of flowers. Now when he mentions a green bower what he means is he's referring to a pleasant shady place below trees so he's admiring it and looking out at this pleasant shady place. Now when he mentions and here's my faith that every flower enjoys the air it breathes here he is personifying flowers okay and he believes as he looks out to nature that every flower enjoys his existence as it spreads out and blooms you know there's this huge harmony that he witnesses within nature. Now this third stanza is significant because here we can see that the garden is unified there are no borders and no restrictions between the flowers as they grow side by side which is in contrast of course when you think about humanity humankind right even for example when you look at world maps we draw lines we divide each other from somebody else right we draw lines to divide one country from the next right we even divide ourselves according to gender according to race according to where we come from class all of that right so human humanity's disharmony and also humanity's fragmentation contrasts with how united and unified nature is okay and this is especially shown through this third stanza now let's read through the three final stanzas. The birds around me hopped and played their thoughts I cannot measure but the least motion which they made it seemed a thrill of pleasure the budding twigs spread out to their fan to catch the breezy air and I must think do all I can that there was pleasure there if this belief from heaven be sent if such be nature's holy plan have I not reasoned to lament what man has made of man now in the fourth stanza Wordsworth looks at how the birds around me hopped and played and the verbs hopped and played emphasize just how carefree and joyful these birds are as they play and move around freely within nature and then he talks about how these birds you know their thoughts and this is a use of alliteration of tea these you know these birds are just super happy and they're not even thinking you know they don't have any shadows or worries in the mind and there's a distance as we can see here between Wordsworth who's observing them and the birds okay there's a distance between him and the birds and there's a contrast between how immobile and how unmoving Wordsworth is even as a human being and how active and free that these birds are within nature and how by extension nature is just really free and really happy and harmonious then Wordsworth relates to and refers to the least motion and thrill of pleasure now here we can see that the birds in the woods have no worries and no pain they live this amazing untroubled life now in the second to last stanza he refers to the budding twigs and this present continuous verb should suggest growth and promise as this is what happens in spring now he then also talks about a fan okay in this same line so the budding twigs spread out their fan and this is a metaphor which implies openness so the twigs are stretching out you know and they're feeling the cool air in the garden then he talks about the to catch the breezy air so the twigs are spreading out they're almost kind of yawning and spreading out their limbs to catch the breezy air right and this is personification it's even suggesting a playfulness of the twigs and then he mentions that there was a pleasure there and here alliteration is especially of tea illustrates that the twigs are blissful and they find a lot of pleasure in growth unlike men and humanity which tends to be very anxious and troubled now in the final stanza he talks about how if this belief from heaven be sent and his reference to heaven being sent shows that he believes that the joy that these plants have is sent directly from heaven and God himself of course also he uses language that belongs to the semantic field of religion so the words heaven and holy to reinforce the fact that nature is living in accordance with what God created it for and we start to question are we as human beings living in accordance with what we are created for then almost as if anticipating what we're going to question he then thinks about whether he has reason to lament and he uses on Jean Mont next to lament to illustrate his mourning and his sorrow and this final rhetorical question is really powerful and he's asking have I not reason to lament what man has made of man now this rhetorical question illustrates how the narrator wordsworth himself is so sad that humanity isn't following its nature it's in a constant state of suffering and strife when we should instead be in a state of bliss okay so that's really it when it comes to considering this poem I hope you find it useful and guys if you want to sign up to um classes so especially GCSE poetry classes GCSE literature classes but equally also this forms a part of a course that I've created especially for AQA students where I literally go into lots of detail on this anthology as well as other texts in the AQA syllabus in case this is English language and literature do make sure you head over to firstritutors.com and of course if you're watching this on youtube make sure you subscribe okay show me some love and guys let me know if you found this useful thank you so much for listening


When I got COVID, I realized I had COVID. I was making coffee one morning, and you know, one of the great things about coffee is in the morning, you can smell it. And it's, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not alone, right? So I'm making coffee. I was, I was literally in my cell at the friary and didn't leave my room for like 10 days. So they got me a little coffee pot that I could put in my little bathroom so that each morning at least I didn't have to ask the friars, bring me coffee, bring me more coffee, right? But one morning I'm making it and I realized I can't smell anything. And then I taste it and I realized there's no taste for it. Such is having COVID. I was listening to a comedian and he was Italian. And he was talking about COVID and he said, the reality is that you never had to talk or manipulate or try to make sure that Italians got the vaccination for COVID. The moment they heard that the loss of taste was the side effect of COVID, they said, every Italian is lining up to get that. He goes, I got Pfizer, I got Johnson and Johnson. I got, he goes, I got every booster, everything was fine. As soon as I learned that I might lose my sense of taste, give it to me, I'll take it. I'm not willing to risk that, right? Taste and see the goodness of the Lord. And I was thinking about that and could we have a more appropriate scripture for us and focusing on the Eucharist for the next couple of days? Literally, taste and see the goodness of the Lord. Dr. Alan Stracke, who taught here for a number of years, just retired at the university. One of the things he was constantly drilling in the students and wherever is that one of the beautiful things about being Catholic is that we're so incarnational is that we believe God can use stuff to reveal himself. And that is first and foremost in the incarnation that God takes the stuff of man and reveals himself. But he takes the stuff of bread that we literally get to take and we get to eat and we get to taste. I love it. It's not just taste, but it's taste and see that we are invited, as we heard earlier today, to really to be able to take in and to ingest and to taste the living God, right? That we get to taste all of the all the adjectives that we would use or all the descriptions of the Lord. We get to taste the bread of life, right? That we get to ingest the bread of life and we put it in our mouth and we chew and we eat and we swallow. We taste the bread of life. I mean, if I want to have life in me, which I do, and Lord, I just desire to be filled with your very presence, then take and eat, literally take and eat and taste what the Lord has done for you. To be able to taste that which is holy, that which is anointed, that which is life giving, to taste the invitation the Lord has given to us. For Francis, he couldn't imagine a God who would humble himself and take on flesh, and then he would go one step further. He couldn't imagine that same God that would allow us to literally to take and to eat. A God who can be tasted, he can be eaten, he can be swallowed, but he understood, right?  If the sweetness of the blood that we place on our lips taste, as the Deacon was saying, the blood was life, the life blood, right? And we get to taste and consume and ingest. Allow that to help us to see. Lord, I want to see your goodness.  It's one dumpster fire after another. So Lord, I want to taste and I want to see your goodness. I want to see your goodness. The brothers that were walking to Emmaus, and they recognize and they're literally blind and the bread is broken. And finally, they can see Lord, I want to taste and I want to see your goodness. I want to claim the reality that when I receive your body and blood that it changes me and it allows me to see it. It clears up the blindness that I see in just you that so often times I can't even see you.  It seems unbelievable that I would not be able to see you, but so often times we don't see you. I want to be able to see you in places that I can't imagine you be. That parishioner that drives me crazy, right? Taste and see the goodness of the Lord. I want to see you in myself, but so often times feel like that I don't quite measure up or I'm not doing a good enough job or I'm not holy enough or I'm not praying up. Taste and see the goodness of God who dwells in you, brother. The part of you that looks in the mirror and at times you just discuss it just not again, right? Taste and see.  But I want to be able to see your glory and your majesty and your anointing and your holiness. I want to claim that word that there is goodness, taste, and see the goodness of the Lord. This is what the Eucharist is, brothers. We're invited to that, right? We're invited and as Deacon said, we receive the Eucharist and we're sent out to see the goodness out there, to be the goodness out there. But it doesn't start, it doesn't happen unless we first come here and we take and we eat and we taste so that we might see. Jesus, allow us to taste, heal our blindness so that we can see your goodness. Amen.


Hi everyone, I'm Ariana Longley and I'm the Chief Operating Officer here at the Patient Safety Movement Foundation. And I am here today with Dr. Benjamin Wang to do an interview around ventilator-associated pneumonia. And so we have a great interview set for you all today to learn a little bit about Dr. Wang and also around some of these policy issues that we think that we might be able to achieve and we hope that you all who are listening in today might have an idea how we can push this forward and we know that in order to improve patient safety we have to get everyone involved and if you're out there listening and have an idea, put your ideas in the comment box below here on YouTube, send us an email and get engaged. We really need to think about this in a new way and really pleased to be with Dr. Wang to get some of his thoughts. So Dr. Wang, thanks for being with us today. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for the warm introduction, Ariana. And please just call me Benjamin, for the sake of personability, please. Sounds good, Benjamin. Well, thanks for being with us.  So I'm a physician and a biochemist by education and training, but about 10 years ago I was taking care of patients in the ICU. And a young 19-year-old young lady came under my care and because she had just given birth and some complications had occurred, she ended up on a ventilator. And my team and I watched this young lady basically get worse on the ventilator and over the course of the next couple of weeks, catch a pneumonia and ultimately pass away. And something about her, I mean, maybe it was the age or the point in which my training, but it didn't seem right to me that these things were happening to patients that were otherwise healthy and young and had their whole lives to look forward to. And as kind of the junior physician on the team, my job was to go into the literature and see if we could have changed that. And lo and behold, I discovered, hey, wait a minute, she caught a pneumonia. She got ventilator-associated pneumonia because of the device we were using in these patients. And that's kind of an interesting theme along with many of these hospital-acquired infections. They're not because people are sick or they come into the setting necessarily, but they're often device-related. And at that point I said, you know, somebody should do something about it. If we don't do something about it, then more of these kind of stories are gonna happen. And I just didn't feel like I could live with myself if I didn't try and do something. So I started a little company to make better devices to prevent those pneumonias. That's awesome, Benjamin. And I think it just shows how many people out there can make an impact, right? You started off your career in critical care as an MD and now we're taking that knowledge that you learned while in medical school and training to be a physician and now are turning that into an entrepreneurial project and company that can impact patients. And I think that value of all that knowledge that you have from your training can now really extend much more broadly. Well, I appreciate that. You know, we do the best we can here at NEVAP. Yeah, good. Well, we're excited to kind of get into VAP as this issue now and I love that we started off with this patient example, right? It's all about how this affects people. These aren't just statistics.  It really impacts everyone. So anyway, I'd love to kind of get into the second question, which is really, why don't you kind of give for the audience listening in background around VAP as a patient safety issue so they can understand why this is important? So the story really starts decades ago when we started to realize when you put a breathing tube into a patient for a longer period of time, the breathing tube is a foreign object that really doesn't belong there. And then when you put them on anesthesia and they can't call for themselves, the breathing tube will end up being a NITIS for infection, which means basically the device causes these infections down the road. We knew decades ago that when you put a breathing tube into a person, their risk of an ammonia increases 600 to 2,000%. And it was so common in these longer term, mechanically ventilated patients that we started to give these entities a name and we started to study them and we called them ventilator associate ammonias because for some reason, when people got put on a ventilator, they developed these specific types of ammonias. Now, they're an interest, this is an interesting condition because it's unlike any condition you see anywhere else. You don't see the types of bacteria and fungus that like to cause these infections in the community. And you don't even see it outside of the ICU. The types of bacteria and the types of infections that are causing these patients are unique, but they are also very hard to treat and many times they're antibiotic resistant just by the nature of the types of bacteria that they grow. So, as physicians, we learn that if somebody comes in from the community, they're likely to have a handful of these types of infections. The types of infections that you see in the ICU are just dramatically different, difficult to treat and deadly many cases. Now, before 2009, the whole world was looking at this and basically saying this is the biggest infection problem we have in the world. You can't provide normal medical care without running into this infection and it was true. But at the same time, it was very hard to diagnose different parts of the world and different institutions had different criteria. And if you weren't looking carefully, you missed it. And patients were worse for wear because we'd lack surveillance. And this was such a big problem that the United States government basically, the Centers for Medicare and Medical Services said, you know what? We can't tolerate these kinds of infections. Hospitals have to do a better job. And so since 2009, they've instituted penalties for having these infections. But what that also did was hospitals because they couldn't solve this problem because patients were still coming in with these infections. As a response to those penalties, many hospitals decided to call the infection something else. That was a first kind of a bad thing that happened because now hospitals were just calling the infection something else, avoiding the penalties.  So the government intervention in this case had quite the opposite effect that had in other places like bloodstream infections and catheter related infections and IV infections and that such. But for ventilator-associated ammonia, it had the opposite effect. It pushed the problem under the radar.  We know when we survey the hospital length of stay and the mortality rate from these ICU patients that we see from the very outside of it from 50,000 feet and nothing has changed. So we have to figure out a way to create better surveillance. So they brought a group of very smart people together, put them in a room and said, come up with a better surveillance criteria. And they created a new surveillance criteria called ventilator-associate events or VAE. And the idea was the ventilators have these are electronic devices and they record the settings on the ventilators. So if you want to catch changes in ventilator settings, then you can do that fairly automatically because it's in the medical record. That way you can hopefully get away from the subjectivity of one doctor calling it one type of pneumonia and another doctor calling another in a hospital saying, you know, we have a lot less of these infections. And that way, hopefully the surveillance will get better. So they did this, they brought these people together and they created this definition, but it turns out that years later, researchers started to investigate these definitions and see if they really worked. And it turns out the definition for ventilator-associated events only covers about 12 to 15% of ventilator-associated pneumonias. Which means the vast majority of these pneumonias, number one, were not being surveyed, were not being recorded. And instead we were trying to measure something that had no correlation in terms of cost control or patient safety. So after enough data came out in 2019, the Center for Medicare and Medical Services basically said, we're gonna do away with this VAE definition in terms of surveillance. So hospitals don't even have to survey or report the number of VAEs they are seeing. Now you can imagine, that's probably not good if you have no surveillance or reporting requirements for hospitals to do this. All the while patients are the ones that are the ones dying and suffering from these conditions. Now, not all the hospitals listened during the pandemic. And actually the CDC came out with a report about two weeks ago that showed the number, the incidents of VAE that was reported to the CDC from 1,400 hospitals during the pandemic increased every quarter for 2020. Sometimes by as much as 45%. Now we knew these criteria were not good. People were not very honest about reporting them. But what we are seeing in terms of ventilator associated pneumonia, that is that it is one of the leading causes of sepsis and death in COVID patients. And when we look across the pond at our counterparts in Europe, they're seeing rates of ventilator associated pneumonia in COVID patients that are 45, 50% and responsible for an additional average stay of two to three weeks. So if you're wondering why this is a big problem, it's because this is the reason why hospitals are doing so poorly during the pandemic. If we could get people off the ventilator sooner and healthier, we'd be in a completely different situation with the pandemic today. Wow, Benjamin. Yeah, you've clearly shown that this is a huge issue and that, although we've been trying to make changes and there's been additional research, now we have the research to show what we're doing isn't really working. So I'd love to just move on to the next kind of section of the interview and talk about coming from this world where you spend probably nearly 100% of your time thinking about VAP every day. What are these attempted solutions to mitigate the prevalence of VAP? And if you can talk specifically around potential policy solutions or reimbursement measures, that would be great. Yeah, so for the most part, I mean, many of the innovative solutions I've seen out, developed in the community are basically trying to again mitigate the fluid and bacteria from entering into the lungs. There are really three things that we can do judiciously in this fashion to improve the situation. And number one is to find ways that we can reduce the number of pathogens that are necessarily in the airway, in the mouth, the nose, and in the trachea leading into the lungs while a patient is intubated. Number two is we can remove the fluid that facilitates the passage of these pathogens into the lungs. And really number three is we have to find ways to get people off ventilators faster because the sooner you get them off, the less ventilator-associated ammonia you see in them. And these, for the most part, they're not rocket science and can be done. It's simply when you go and talk to customers, the end clinicians, you hit a wall because it's not a problem if you can hide the problem from the payers. Now, from a policy standpoint, that's what's really holding back a lot of innovation is if you allow hospitals to cover up that they have this enormous problem, they don't wanna solve it. They're not going to solve it. Just like climate change. For us, in medicine, antibiotic resistance and infection and these kind of complications are our climate change. If we do nothing and we allow the status quo, eventually we're not going to be able to do the things that we want to do in medicine. A lot of our advances in our technologies rely on the fact that we can do surgery, that we can anesthetize a patient, that we can help them breathe for them when they cannot do that. If we lose that ability, a lot of what we do in medicine, in modern medicine disappears and is not safe to perform. But from a policy standpoint, I mean, the negative incentives that government has put in place are not working. You know, they haven't worked from the beginning. They haven't put the focus on these infections but have basically incentivized hospitals to run the other way and decide that they don't have any of them. So if there's one policy change that needs to begin, it has to do with surveillance and penalties. Hospitals are not gonna come clean and look for a solution if they think they can hide. But at the same time, they only wanna hide this problem because there are negative incentives in place. The first thing we should do is ask CMS to remove the penalties for these types of infections so that hospitals can begin to estimate and come clean with the fact that there are these complications. And that will have ripple effects in terms of innovation too. We're not solving the problem today as it is but that's not to say that in the future solutions can't appear to address this problem. If it's necessary to do better surveillance, the key with ventilator associated pneumonia and some of these other hospital-acquired infections is the fact that they are unlike things that we see in the community. If the government really wants to quantify and survey the problem carefully, all they have to do is carefully look at the types of infections and the antibiotics prescribed in these cases. And I know for a fact that it's in everybody's interest to have better antibiotic surveillance but also stewardship because these are the only drugs that we have in modern medicine that the more we use, the less effective they become. And we have to look at them more as a resource rather than a way to avoid addressing real systemic problems in our healthcare system. Absolutely. I think you bring up really good points that here at the patient safety movement we bring up all the time that we can't continue doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. We have to get new minds together, get new conversations to happen. And so we've been so thankful to talk with you today, Benjamin, because you're planting these ideas for everyone who's watching now, maybe there's something that everyone can do. And so I'd love to just kind of end with what, if someone's watching who is caring for a loved one or might have been a patient themselves or might be a health worker in a similar situation to you, they just wanna do something to hopefully change the outcome for future patients or administrators who are collecting that data. What are, if we focus on maybe those three first and can leave the policymakers last, what can these people do that are watching today to try to help? I think they can, I'd love to tell everybody that they could do something different. And I'm sure that everybody has a place to play a role to play in the movement to change this situation. I mean, one of the best ways is to basically be an advocate and to look where other people aren't looking. I mean, from a patient standpoint or even a clinician standpoint, when you see something that you don't understand, if you see if a loved one or a friend gets sick and you've never even heard, you can't imagine the bacteria that you hear that's growing or the infection problem that's growing, read a little bit, learn about it and be an advocate. Go out there and say something to somebody about it because the more that we kind of gloss over and accept that this is something, it's a problem that we're not willing to understand, the less attention will be brought to these problems. Quite frankly, many of these patients who are in the ICU right now are the ones who are there because they got ventilator-associated pneumonia. We know that from the data. From a clinician and then administrative level, I mean, yes, we can see these problems very clearly and we should listen to the research and be attentive of what is happening in our healthcare system because I tell this to people who are trying to be leaders in healthcare all the time. It's great to put in hard work and to inspire other people along. Think about what is your legacy when you leave that hospital, when you leave that room with that patient, when you leave and retire and go on to do whatever it is you wanna do, what is the legacy that we leave for future generations or even just the patient that is going to be discharged from the hospital? I like to think that we should all strive to leave something better than it was before. And one of those ways that we can do that is we can prevent more of these infections and save more lives. That's what I would tell people, just be attentive, look at the details. Yeah, I love that. And when I think about hopefully people from the public seeing this video, it is. It's the speak up, listen and observe and ask those questions. I think there's still so much work we all have to do to make sure that patients and their family members know that they can speak up and ask those questions. And if they don't understand something, that it's okay and step back a bit and ask that provider, hey, use language I can understand, so beautiful. Well, thank you so much, Benjamin, for joining us today. Any last minute thoughts before we close? No, no, I just, I'm always very hopeful and optimistic. I really do believe that we can solve this problem together. We just have to make it our priority to do so. Absolutely, so thank you so much, Benjamin. And for everyone who's watched, leave comments below and let us know what you think and how you can help, how you think other people can help. So thank you very much, have a great day. You too, have, take care, bye-bye. Bye.