March 16, 2025 • 59 mins
In this episode of Still Unbelievable! Matthew reviews another conversion story. This one features Daniel, who is known as Darwin to Jesus on that hive of shitiness formally known as Twitter. Daniel's takes on matters of religion and atheism are bad, so bad that there are many who actually think he's a troll parodying the worst of religion. Our confidence that he is a real Christian is about 90%, the 10% in reserve is because there are times we wonder if he is a very clever troll. The main reason is because a troll couldn't keep it up for as long as he has. Which makes the things he says worthy of Matthew's special brand of sarcastic retort, which will be employed by the bucket in this episode, because the things Daniel says are genuinely pathetic and any christian who gives his stupidity a platform deserves ridicule.
The episode being responded to is link 1 and is from the podcast, Ex-skeptic. Yes, there really is a podcast called ex-skeptic, featuring versions of Christianity that actually celebrate turning away from skeptical thought. It's as though they are no longer ashamed of unreasonable credulity. If we weren't so busy rolling our eyes, we'd actually find time to pity those fools.
And with that done, let's get on with the shit show.
1) Original episode
https://exskeptic.org/podcast/dismantling-atheism-daniels-story/
2) Ben Affleck, Sam Harris and Bill Maher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vln9D81eO60
3) The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
https://amzn.eu/d/7dzrycN
4) How Morality Has the Objectivity that Matters—Without God
https://secularhumanism.org/2014/07/cont-how-morality-has-the-objectivity-that-matterswithout-god/
To contact us, email: reasonpress@gmail.com
our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonpress2901
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:04):
Daniel fails to dismount on atheism.
This is Matthew, and in this episode of Still Unbelievable,
I'll be reviewing another conversion story.
This one features Daniel, who isknown as Darwin to Jesus, on
that hive of shittiness formerlyknown as Twitter.
Daniel's takes on matters of religion and atheism are bad, So
(00:26):
bad that there are many who actually think he's a troll
parodying the worst of religion.My confidence that he is a real
Christian is about 90%, the 10% in reserve.
It's because there are times I do wonder if he is a very clever
troll. The main reason I think he isn't
is because I don't think a trollcould keep it up for as long as
(00:47):
he has. Therefore, I'm inclined to
believe he's the real deal, which makes the things he says
worthy of my special brand of sarcastic retort, which I will
be employing by the bucket in this episode.
Because the things Daniel says are genuinely pathetic and any
Christian who gives his stupidity a platform deserves
(01:09):
ridicule. The episode I'm responding to is
link one in the show notes and it's from the podcast Ex
Sceptic. Yes, there really is a podcast
called Ex Sceptic featuring versions of Christianity that
actually celebrate turning away from sceptical thought.
(01:30):
It's as though they are no longer ashamed of unreasonable
credulity. If I wasn't so busy rolling my
eyes I'd actually find time to pity the food.
Goes home crying to his Mama. Get that done, let's get on with
the shit show. In our story today, former
atheist Daniel was seeking substantive answers to his
(01:51):
looming questions that simple faith did not seem to provide.
That's the voice of Janna Harman, the host of the Ex
Skeptic podcast introducing Daniel.
And yes, you really did hear herrefer to atheism as simple
faith. The dumbness really does start
before the opening Jingle has finished.
(02:11):
Daniel is a bold and winsome advocate for Jesus Christ with a
strong online presence on Twitter X as Darwin to Jesus,
where he thoughtfully engages with those who reject belief.
In God, I really should have dugout a laugh or a groan sound
effect for that, but I don't want to overuse them.
(02:32):
No, Daniel is not thoughtful. Anybody who's read any of his
tweets will realise that he is not thoughtful.
Thoughtful is the last thing that Daniel ever could be.
But you'll also hear his wise and practical advice to both.
No, I give up. I just can't take it anymore.
(02:52):
Laugh. Sound effect engaged already.
I'm sure there'll be more. Welcome to the Ex Skeptic
podcast, Daniel. It's great to have you with me
today. It's such a great honour to be
here with you Jenna, and so wonderful to meet you.
As we're getting started, I'd love for the listeners to know a
little bit about you. I am a Christian.
(03:13):
I am passionate about Christianity and about my
relationship with Jesus Christ and I am a former atheist.
I consider myself to have been alifelong atheist.
And right now, one of the thingsI primarily do, I have a Twitter
account named Darwin to Jesus. And I'm trying to outreach to
(03:34):
atheists and I'm challenging them.
And a lot of them may not like me, you know, and, and I felt
the same way about apologists when I was an atheist.
But I'm engaging with them, trying to have conversations
with them and. 90% of the posts on Daniel's Twitter feed are
shitty memes. You don't start conversations
(03:55):
with shitty memes. Here is 1, which is not a meme.
Most atheists are upset with Godbecause they think they should
have his job. That's why they complain so much
about how the world is. Daniel, you don't have
conversations by posting things like that.
The idea is to lead them to Jesus Christ, leave them to the
(04:17):
Savior. And one of the things I started
doing recently is Twitter Spaces, where it's basically an
open chat room. And I invite an atheist in to
come talk to me for about two hours and we talk about my
reasons for why I believe in Godand we talk about their reasons
for why they don't believe in God.
And. And yet, having allegedly done
(04:38):
that, he still fails utterly andmiserably to actually represent
what atheism or atheists are. What a turd.
The whole point is just to create an atmosphere where it's
not a debate, it's just a friendly conversation.
And yet Daniel utterly fails to do friendly on his actual
(05:00):
Twitter feed. I've not been to one of those
spaces. Maybe I will try and sit in on
one. We'll see about that, but I'm
not encouraged to because Danielis decidedly unfriendly.
In this day of tribalism and us,the mentality, Daniel, it's so
great that you have a place thatis conducive to just congenial
(05:21):
conversation. Daniel's Twitter feed is not
conducive to congenial conversation, Not at all.
Go and have a look, Jenna. You'll see for yourself.
All right, why don't you paint apicture for us?
Because obviously that atheism didn't come out of nowhere.
Let's find out a little bit about how you were raised and
(05:44):
how you were raised to think about God and your world as a
child. Absolutely.
So if you asked my mom and dad about me becoming an atheist,
they would have said it absolutely came out of nowhere
because I was raised Christian. I was raised Pentecostal.
And there we have the seeds. Before Daniel took on the label
(06:06):
atheist, he already had a foundation of fundamentalist
Christianity. We'll see how his story builds,
but I'm willing to bet that those seeds that he was
indoctrinated with as a child will show in how he reports on
his atheist phase. And for anyone who doesn't know
what that means, essentially Pentecostals are the ones that
(06:28):
put their hands up in the air during the worship hour.
Only an hour. Fucking lightweight.
One of the things that my mom says, and I, I believe that it's
true, but I don't remember this,is that I even got baptized when
I was about six or seven years old, she says.
I went to a Christian camp during the summer and got
baptized there and came back andI was on fire for God.
I did a decade of leading on a Christian summer camp.
(06:52):
Yeah, the pressure put on those kids.
Not good. Not good at all.
I have a terrible memory and I don't remember any of that.
What I remember is always hatinggoing to church.
Fool you man, I didn't always enjoy church as a kid either.
Still ends up on fire for God though.
And my parents would make me go to church every Sunday.
(07:15):
Unfortunately, my father called himself a Christian and he did
not act very much like a Christian.
And I think that looking back, that probably had a lot to do
with some of the choices that I made in my life as far as how I
felt about God and where I endedup going at certain points.
Because I think that a father and how he represents Christ to
(07:39):
his children is really going to affect their view of God.
Because my father was abusive and he was intimidating and he
was just not a kind man to myself or my mom or my brother
or my sister. It really did not impress me
that he called himself Christianbecause he was really just a
(08:01):
hypocrite and I was not impressed with Christianity as a
result of that. Interesting shifting of the
blame there. My own dad could be a bit of a
Dick sometimes as well. I spent most of my teenage years
not being impressed by him. Still stayed on fire for God
though. I can't blame him for leaving.
Wasn't my dad's fault. As I got older, there were
(08:24):
questions when I was 10/11/12 about Christianity that I had
and I would ask these questions and my mom and dad just couldn't
answer them. I would ask questions about, you
know, things like, well, if God is all knowing, then how is it
that we have free will? Which is a good question and I
(08:45):
get asked that now, but. It is a good question.
Well I doubt that 10 year olds come up with it.
I think Daniel is misrememberinghis timeline here.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone in their teens asked
this, but in 20 years of runningyouth groups, including the
aforementioned 10 years of summer camp, I never had this
question from a preteen. But Daniel is prone to elevating
(09:08):
his own importance, so this statement is on par for his ego.
It's a question that I I would ask my mom and she would say you
just have to have faith. And that started to really rub
me the wrong way because I started thinking to myself,
well, people in India, you know,children in India are raised in
(09:29):
a different religion. And they probably have
questions, like I'm having questions.
And what are they told? Are they told you just need to
have faith? Because what they believe and
what I believe are not the same thing.
If I'm right, then they're wrong.
And if they're right, then I'm wrong.
So it seems like just have faithisn't really going to cut it.
(09:49):
It seems like we need some way to know if what we believe is
true. I agree having faith isn't good
enough. I need a reason to believe
something is true, and somethingas important as what Christians
claim needs a very convincing line of evidence.
Because if what they believe is true, I might be in big trouble.
(10:10):
And if what I believe is true, then they're definitely in big
trouble. Yeah, because there's nothing
quite as loving as a God that would destroy you for daring to
believe the wrong thing. If you have young children or
teenagers, I would really encourage you to study
apologetics and try to have answers.
Because there's nothing like a bit of post hoc rationalisation
(10:31):
of your own evidenced belief in order to aid in your
indoctrination of young people who have not yet grasped the
concept of critical thinking. It should be able to hold up the
scrutiny if it's true. I agree, and that's why I look
dimly on apologetics. I want evidence that can be
tested, not arguments that lead to a predetermined conclusion.
(10:53):
About the age of 15 or 16, I went to church with my mom for
the last time. We we drove there and I got out
of the car and I looked at my mom and I said, I'm not going in
there, I'm going to walk home and you can't make me go to
church. And I knew that it was true
because I was bigger than her, and she knew that it was true.
(11:15):
And after that, I didn't go to church anymore.
And once I stopped going to church, that's when I really
started to get into atheism. Because before that I was more
just, I don't like to go to church.
And I don't think that Christianity is true.
But when I stopped going to church, I started looking up
atheist videos online, and I started hearing arguments that
(11:38):
were against Christianity. And a lot of those arguments I
thought were really, really good.
Do you have any examples of those arguments, Daniel?
I grew up in the time where the four horsemen of atheism were
very popular. So those horsemen were Harris,
Hitchens, Dennett and Dawkins. And my favorite of the four
(12:02):
horsemen was Hitchens by far. I thought that he was just
brilliant. I thought that he won all of the
debates that he was in, which isfunny because now when I go back
and I listen to the debates thathe did, he really didn't do very
well at all. It was mostly rhetoric.
This is why I'm not a fan of thedebate format.
(12:23):
Yes, a well formed argument doeshave the power to change
someone's mind, but it's not as successful as we like to
imagine. Debates are more successful at
affirming what we already believe, especially if it is a
belief with little evidential foundation.
Daniel's view on the debate performance has changed to align
(12:44):
with his beliefs. This is why I asked for a
methodology for validating a belief.
Arguments do not impress me. I got really, really deep into
atheism. I got really passionate about
it. Started pushing back on my mom
while I still live there. Became even more of a terror to
her because now I was asking questions, not in good faith,
but to try to destroy her world view, to destroy her faith
(13:08):
because I thought it was bad. Once you become the type of
atheist that I was, you feel like you're smarter than pretty
much everybody else. And then you're unfamiliar with
Daniels online presence. On that Twitter website, he
still gives off that vibe. It seems that this behavior is
inherent in Daniel's shitty personality.
You feel like you've figured outsomething that nobody else
(13:31):
knows. You figured out that God isn't
real, and everybody believes that God is real.
So they're all wrong. Everybody's being duped.
But you figured it out. So you're you're a lot smarter
than everybody else because they're all being fooled and you
figured out the truth. That's all you, Daniel.
The deconstruction groups that I'm a part of do not have that
kind of personality in them. And it's very much a superior
(13:56):
way of thinking. Lack of epistemic humility is
definitely a Daniel problem. I definitely thought of myself
as being better than others and I had very little empathy for
other people. And you still don't.
I thought that all of the world's problems came from
religion, and I thought that we needed to destroy religion and
(14:17):
usher in the great atheist utopia of reason.
Reason is certainly better than faith, but fundamentalist
absolutist thinking is bad no matter what side holds it.
That's how a lot of atheists think.
Misrepresenting others is bad. OK, my research.
I found that to be a very prominent characteristic is a
sense of intellectual superiority.
(14:39):
The research that Jenna is referring to is a PhD that she's
done on people deconstructing ordeconverting.
Maybe I should dig that out and have a read of it and see what
she actually does say in it. So you said that you were a
passionate atheist for 45 years.What happened from there?
Well, I stayed pretty passionateafter that, but at about the
(15:00):
four to five year mark, something happened that really
shook me up. This was 2012 and what I saw was
the Bill Maher show. And it was Sam Harris was
talking with Bill Maher. He was on his show and he was
talking to Ben Affleck. Sam Harris was saying as
(15:20):
rational atheist, we should be more against Muslims than we are
against Christianity because Muslims are way more
conservative. They also believe in God and
they're committing terrorism allover the world, which Christians
aren't doing. See link at 2 for the video that
Daniel is referring to. There is a very valid point
here. Islam is a shitty religion in
(15:43):
the world today. Islam is responsible for more
oppression and more harm than Christianity.
The core tenets of some forms ofIslam are far worse than the
worst of Christianity. This is all true.
Why don't I spend my time critiquing Islam?
Because Islam is not part of my life or my culture.
(16:04):
I have not spent any part of my life being harmed by Islam.
Islam being crap does not mean that Christianity gets a pass.
Christianity is still shit in places and those aspects deserve
critique. And because it is part of my
life, I focus on what I know. The next morning, after this had
(16:26):
happened, about half of the atheists sided with Ben Affleck
and not Sam Harris. And that really, really
surprised me because I thought that Sam Harris was obviously
correct. To see them side with him really
surprised me because I thought that atheists were these
(16:47):
enlightened beings like myself. We had figured out something no
one else knew. We had seen through the veil.
And yet here are these atheists that don't even understand that
Islam is more conservative than Christians, than Christianity.
So if you're going to be againstChristianity for being
conservative and religious, why would you be less against
(17:10):
another religion that is more conservative and also religious
and more violent? This was the beginning of a
split in the atheist community. I've not fact checked this point
by Daniel. Maybe he's right, or maybe he's
overstated the response. For the sake of this commentary,
I'm going to accept that he's being accurate because it
(17:32):
doesn't change the fact that Christianity is still deserving
of critique and still makes claims that are not evidence
based. And the split was basically the
true liberals, like I consider myself to be, versus the people
that had gone off the deep end. And I didn't know what those
people were doing, but I knew that they were wrong.
(17:54):
It was something that really shook me up.
And I started to ask questions because I I became a little bit
unnerved about my atheism to seethat.
Sorry, what? Some people failing to critique
Islam deservedly made you question your commitment to
atheism? Really.
(18:17):
Is that how weak minded you really are?
Really. OK.
The next thing that really kind of changed the way that I
perceived all of this, because now I considered myself a
classical liberal, There was this Crossfitter that I really
respected. He was the number one
Crossfitter in the world, and his name was Rich Froning.
(18:38):
He was just a really good sportsman, a man of character.
He would help people when they finished.
One day I was watching a Netflixdocumentary about Rich Froning
and I saw that he was there withhis family and I was just
thinking, what a great guy. I'd like to be like this guy
someday. As I'm watching, he sits down
(19:01):
with his family to eat and what do they do?
They prayed. And as soon as I saw him pray, I
thought to myself, oh, he's justa stupid Christian.
And I completely dismissed him. I completely dismissed him out
of my mind. I had no more respect for him in
that moment. But then I thought, why am I
(19:23):
dismissing him? If I were, say, deployed right,
would I want somebody like Rich Froning with me?
Or would I want all the atheiststhat I know that I'm used to
talking with, that I'm used to dealing with?
Would I trust any of them, or would I rather have Rich
Froning? And the answer was obviously I
(19:47):
would prefer to have someone like Rich Froning.
Based on what? Because you saw him pray with
his children over a meal? Or because you saw that his
children like him? What do either of those two
qualities have when it comes to being in service somewhere?
Seems that there's an odd criteria going on here.
And I'm not saying every atheistis low character.
(20:09):
Sounds like you are Daniel, and that's certainly the impression
you give on your Twitter feed. But pretty much every atheist
that I knew was, and I knew quite a few.
Oh, that warm, comforting glow of good old fashioned Christian
humility. And I think that that's pretty
darn typical. When I would interact with them
(20:29):
personally or when it was just us atheists, the only things we
we would be talking about or they would want to talk about
wasn't philosophy, it wasn't what was true.
It was women, drugs and other degenerate things that I don't
really want to specify. Sounds like it was the crowd
that you were mixing with Daniel, not atheists
(20:51):
specifically. So I did not have a very high
opinion of my fellow atheists. And when I realized that Rich
Froning was someone that I really looked up to and
respected, it actually shifted the way that I thought about
Christians, because up until that point I thought of them as
the bad guys. But in that moment when I
(21:12):
realized that I'd rather have Rich Froning with me than 1000
atheists, it really changed my window.
My the Overton Window completelyshifted of in regards to
Christianity and atheism and theway that I saw them, and it made
me start to see Christianity as something that was important to
our society. Basically, Daniel is admitting
(21:33):
here that he was mixed in with questionable characters and he
associated their behaviour with atheism specifically, and that
he looked up to someone who turned out to be a Christian and
that caused his world view to shift.
That's probably not unusual. This is the power of personal
witness, and if he'd been mixingwith a more balanced group of
people he might have had a different response.
(21:55):
Daniel doesn't give his age here, but given that he said he
turned atheist in his teens and that this was about five years
later, this would put him in hisearly 20s, which is basically
the age when lads hang around with other lads and generally
act like Dicks. This isn't an atheism thing,
it's a male thing. If the atheists that I knew were
(22:15):
going to become more popular, and if people like Rich Froning
became less popular and eventually became extinct, well,
what would a world of the atheists that I knew be like?
It'd be terrible. Sure, a world with more shit
people and less good people would be a terrible world.
That's not to do with religion or atheism, though.
(22:36):
I would not want to live in thatworld.
But by being the really shitty Christian witness that you are,
that is the world you're attempting to create.
And. When you start to realize that,
you start to think, well, I wantto live in a world with
Christians because these are thepeople that I can depend on.
When you compare a bunch of red blooded high jinxed 20 year old
(22:59):
American males with one individual adult with a family
who turns out to be decent and then also a Christian, you're
going to end up with a completely 1 sided view which is
terribly inaccurate. You know, I want to live in a
world with Rich Froning's. I have no idea who Rich Froning
(23:20):
is, but let's imagine that he isthe decent chap that Daniel says
he is. Great.
That being true, yes, I want to live in a world where every man
is that nice, that decent, that good, that respectable, that
admirable. But that is not the world we
live in, and it is certainly notthe world that all Christians
are like, wow, is that really what got him to convert to
(23:45):
Christianity? Shit.
You had this negative view, thisnegative view of Christians, but
you met someone who countered that, who disrupted that
negative stereotype that you hadbuilt in your mind.
I love that. Why, Jenna, why do you love
that? One decent person who happens to
(24:06):
hold to a specific world view isenough to adopt that world view?
Really. I've met nice Muslims.
I have no intention whatsoever of becoming a Muslim.
Why does one nice person make anentire worldview worthy of
respect and adoption? A lot of people don't recognise
(24:27):
that the Christian worldview is really substantive and helped
build our civil society. Hundreds of years of social
domination, introduction of slavery, Oppression of those
unwilling to conform, murdering those from other cultures,
forced conversion. The list of shitty things that
Christianity did in order to maintain itself as a dominating
(24:48):
force is depressing. A good witness can actually
change the way that someone elseviews you.
That is true, and so is the opposite.
So tell me, Daniel, why do so many atheists think that you're
an absolute shit? So I basically became a lot more
conservative after that because I realized that these
(25:09):
conservative values that Christians were in favour of
were really the things that werekeeping our society going.
So you swapped one type of dickishness for another type of
dickishness. So maybe this guy who you think
is so great isn't so great afterall.
But I thought that what they believed still wasn't true.
(25:31):
I didn't think that there was any good reason to believe in
God. One of those reasons, the main
reason why I didn't think that there was any good reason to
believe in God was because I wascalling myself an empiricist.
And I said, you know, I don't believe that God exists because
I've never seen God As you show me God, I'll believe in God
until I'm able to perceive God, until you give me sense data,
(25:55):
evidence, I'm not going to believe it.
Well, that almost sounds reasonable.
The guy's saying he's looking for evidence, but he specified
sense data. It's almost as though he doesn't
realise that our senses can be manipulated, can be deceived.
I wonder if he's sort of coming up with a way of excluding our
(26:16):
senses and yet coming up with anobjective, testable, reliable,
validatable result. That was my quote UN quote
epistemology. I was saying I don't have any
sensory evidence of God, so I don't believe in God.
The next big thing that really kind of changed my views on
(26:38):
things was that I talked to my cousin about why conservatives
and liberals had these differentways of looking at the world,
and he said you need to read this book.
And the book was The Righteous Mind.
See link at three. The book The Righteous Mind by
(27:01):
Jonathan Haidt appears to be critically acclaimed and very
well received, and it makes somefairly good points.
Follow the link and read about it yourself.
So I went, I read the book and the main next part of my story
is I went into a chat room. There were a bunch of atheists
in there and I was just going tolisten to what they had to say.
(27:24):
And they were interested in talking to me because they
hadn't seen me in there before. I started talking with them, and
they wanted to ask me some questions and see if I was
intelligent or not. I guess eventually one of the
topics that came up was morality.
And I made it known that I thought that rape was wrong,
(27:44):
something along those lines. And they said, well, what do you
mean that rape is wrong? And I said, you know, it's
wrong. It's, it's immoral.
And they they said like, actually wrong, objectively
wrong. And I said, yeah, of course.
And they said, you really think that you can account for
objective moral values and duties if there is no God.
And I said, of course, but I hadn't really given it much
(28:07):
thought. And they basically schooled me
about morality and they told me we really can't justify
objective morality at all because in order to justify
objective morality, you need some type of actual objective
goal giver. You need meaning, you need
purpose, you need objective values like goodness and
(28:30):
vadnais. So anyway, they kind of went
through some of this stuff with me.
I thought that they were completely wrong.
I thought that atheism absolutely could account for
objective moral values and duties, and I thought it was the
most ridiculous thing in the world that they couldn't see
that. And I was not about to say that
morality was subjective, becauseto me that is always been
(28:54):
absolutely ridiculous. I've always known that there is
such a thing as actual right andwrong, and I set out to prove
them wrong because I still thought the atheism was true.
But I definitely did not think that morality was subjective.
So I tried for about two to three years to figure out a way
(29:18):
to account for objective moral values and duties without God
from an atheist point of view, and the more I studied it, the
more I realized that it's just not something that can really be
done. I have no idea what study Daniel
did over those two years or whathe was looking for, but there
(29:38):
are multiple excellent articles on objective secular morality.
C link 4 for an example. There are good points to be made
in the case for a godless objective morality.
One example would be the case ofcooperation within a group.
In order for a group to work productively together there must
(29:58):
be an element of behavioural trust.
Things like telling the truth, not trying to cheat others,
general positive ethical behaviour.
In other words, acting to a specific set of moral standards
that is not explicitly written down.
It is fair to call these objective in the sense that the
group innately knows to abide bythem, and no God is required for
(30:23):
us to know what they are. It's anyone's guess why Daniel
found it so hard to find this information.
I expect that his formative upbringing in a Christian home
was instrumental in his thinkinghere.
Atheists or atheism simply cannot account for objective
moral values and duties. Well, for starters, atheism
(30:45):
doesn't pretend to explain this.For that you need secular
humanism, and that explains it very well.
If Daniel is looking for the answer in atheism, he is doing
it wrong. And when I realised this, it
really shook me because I thought that atheism was true.
But how can atheism be true if it can't account for other
(31:06):
things that I think are just as true, like that rape is wrong,
or that murder is wrong and these types of things?
I know you don't need me to, butI'll repeat myself anyway.
Atheism doesn't say any of thosethings.
All it is is a single position on the single question.
Is there a God? For everything else there is
secular humanism or another philosophy if you prefer.
(31:29):
Anyone looking to atheism to answer those questions for them
is simply looking in all the wrong places.
And just for clarity, you're notsaying that that people who
don't believe in God can't know what is good, but they just
can't find a basis for that, right?
Essentially, yes. Wrong.
If there is no God, then goodness and vadnais don't
(31:50):
exist. Wrong.
So I'm not saying that if you don't believe in God, you can't
be a good person. I'm saying that if God doesn't
exist, there's no such thing as good or bad people.
There's no such thing as how we ought to be.
If there is no God, then whatever I want to do, I can do,
(32:10):
and it just is what I'm doing. There's no value about it, and a
lot of atheists, like you said, do misunderstand this argument.
Oh, we understand it. You're just wrong and it's your
failure to understand how there is morality beyond your God.
And they think that you're saying that atheists are just
bad and immoral people because they don't believe in God.
(32:31):
And that's not what I'm arguing.I'm saying that the existence of
goodness and vadnais cannot exist unless God exists.
These things are. The problem for Daniel here and
all theists that make a similar claim is that goodness and
vadnais do not exist. Good and bad, evil,
(32:52):
righteousness, whatever you wantto say.
They are just labels that we useto describe something that we
agree with or don't agree with. They don't exist as entities.
There isn't a goodness entity floating around in the universe
that touches us and helps us to behave.
It's just a label that we give about things that we like.
This threw me for a loop, and itmade me start to look at atheism
(33:16):
differently than I had before inanother very significant way.
Because before I looked at atheists differently, but now I
was looking at the atheism itself, the idea that there is
no God differently. And I was realizing that there
were entailments to this worldview, that there were
consequences to it. And I never realized that
before. I had never realized that there
(33:37):
were consequences to my worldview and that I had a
worldview. And once I realized that, oh,
atheism can't get me objective morality.
Because it doesn't attempt to. If you're going to look for
answers in atheism that atheism doesn't even promise, then you
are going to be disappointed. But that's not the fault of
(33:59):
atheism. That's the fault of you and your
expectations. And that's absurd.
It made me start to question what else atheism couldn't get
me. Nothing.
There's nothing it can get you, because atheism is a single
response to a single question. Do I believe there is a God?
No. Great.
(34:20):
I'm atheist. That does not give me anything
else. Not anything philosophical, not
anything scientific, because that is not what it's meant to
do. Numbskull.
Are there things that I'm believing as an atheist that I
really have no right to believe in?
As an atheist, I believe that PCis better than Mac.
(34:40):
Oh no, the world has ended. And so I started to actually
critically look at my beliefs asan atheist.
We should all be prepared to critically examine the things
that we believe. I was an empiricist.
I needed you to show me whateveryou wanted me to believe in.
I'm saying it's logical to use my senses in order to perceive
(35:02):
the world, and if I don't perceive something in the world
I I shouldn't believe in it. It's not quite that simple.
It's not limited just to our senses.
Experimental data is very important when it comes to
scientific progress and having evidence of the existence of
things. We can't see, touch, or feel a
black hole, but there is other sensory and evidential data that
(35:25):
we can use to determine that they exist.
That's appealing to logic, right?
That's a form of argument right there.
If you say so, but I'm getting the tingly senses that there's a
straw man approaching. So I clearly must believe that
logic exists. Exists as what?
You can't detect it using any ofyour senses, so how do you
(35:46):
believe that logic exists? What form does it take, Daniel?
I'd never seen logic. I'm appealing to it.
There are three laws of logic. As defined by humans.
I believe that they existed, andyet I had never held any of
these laws in my hand. So these laws that I believed
in, that I was appealing to, they didn't exist in a material
(36:10):
way. And yet here I was, calling
myself a materialist. Materialist or empiricist?
Well, what a materialist believe.
They believe that everything is made of matter.
Or is dependent on matter. Thinking isn't matter, but
thinking requires matter. Well, if I believe that
everything is made of matter. You'd be an idiot or you'd be
(36:31):
lying about your past beliefs. Then why am I believing in
something that isn't made of matter?
That doesn't make sense. No, it doesn't.
And it is very much a you problem, Daniel.
So what should I do? Stop talking, turn off your
computer and go home to your mother.
And it wasn't just the laws of logic.
(36:51):
I mean, numbers also are not made of matter, and yet I
believe that the #7 exists. Oh no, there's #7 hell, that
means atheism is false. Fucking hell, could this guy get
any more dim? So you've got a lot of different
types of things that are immaterial and that I believed
in. Welcome to being a grown up,
(37:12):
Daniel. None of that validates your
stupid mythological belief. So it's at this point that I
went into Discord to talk to an atheist friend of mine.
I brought these problems up to him and I said, hey, if we're
atheists and we're empiricists and we're materialists, why are
(37:33):
we believing in things like lawsof logic?
Why are we believing in things like numbers?
Seriously, this is so dumb it's beyond laughable.
It's things like this that make others think that Daniel is a
troll, seeing how far he can push Christian stupidity until
it cracks. Either way, Jana should know
better than to allow this sort of bullshit to fly without push
(37:53):
back. When a genuine Christian like
Jana allows this level of idiocyto go unchecked, then she kills
her own credibility. Not that she really had any with
a podcast name like Ex Skeptic, but you get my point.
And what he said to me, I will never forget as long as I live,
he said. If you keep asking questions
(38:17):
like this, you will not be an atheist much longer.
Yeah, the friend was right. You ask dumb questions like
that, you're going to open yourself up to any really stupid
belief. I was really taken aback by that
and very, very disappointed. What?
Else did your friend say Daniel?Did he put you right on the
stupidity of your question, or have you failed to tell us the
(38:39):
rest of the conversation? I mean, I felt, now that I think
about it, I felt a lot like I had when my mom would answer
questions that I had about Christianity.
You know, you just have to have faith.
Well, he's saying stop asking these questions, basically.
Really, I'm going to call bullshit on this one because
Daniel's history of misrepresentation and outright
(39:02):
lies on his social media tells me that I should not trust his
reporting of this conversation. That just made me want to ask
more questions. I've always wanted to know what
the truth was. And so did all the people who
left Christianity because after being tested, Christianity
failed. So when he said you're asking a
(39:24):
good questions and you should stop.
Sticking my neck out. What was probably said was
you're asking the wrong questions because atheism does
not say anything to those questions.
That made me want to ask even more questions, and so that's
what I did. Asking more questions is not in
itself a bad thing, in fact, I highly encourage it.
(39:46):
But if you're seeking answers from a source that is not
equipped to give those answers, or is not designed to give those
answers, then you're looking foranswers in the wrong places and
one of the things that Christianity is especially good
at. Is making up bullshit answers
for areas where it really has nobusiness.
So if confidence in answers is what you're looking for,
(40:08):
Christianity might be the place for you.
But it is not a source of truth.I guess the next really big
thing, and this was probably thebiggest thing that really showed
me that I was wrong and that atheism was not true, was the
problem of knowledge. We have a very bad feeling about
this. Atheism leads to a contradiction
(40:30):
because atheism cannot account for any knowledge whatsoever.
When you spend your time lookingfor answers in the wrong places,
the only thing you're going to find is disappointment.
When I say knowledge, I mean a belief that is true and that we
have a justification for. And since atheism is simply the
answer to a single question about belief in God, and it is
(40:53):
actually science and the methodologies behind it that
give us justifications, Daniel'sbeen looking in the wrong
places. No wonder he's confused, missed
up, fucked up and damn right stupid.
The reason why atheists cannot account for knowledge is because
they have to start with themselves.
Wait, are you critiquing atheismor atheists?
(41:14):
Because atheists account for knowledge by, as I mentioned
earlier, the scientific method ignored philosophies surrounding
it. Because there is no transcendent
mind in their belief system. So in their belief system, any
truth has to come to them via whatever resources they just are
(41:35):
made with. Which is true of everybody who
has ever existed, including yourself, Daniel.
Though resources we are made with is a little bit of a weird
way to phrase things because humans have got their own
ingenuity. Humans have created a
methodology, we call it science,which helps us to test and
validate and confirm things. And that is what is the basis of
(41:58):
all the knowledge that we have. This is what we have to use when
it comes to knowledge. You need to have actual
justification. Yes, that is why science exists,
Daniel. And if there is no God, I don't
believe that you can justify anybelief whatsoever.
And that is why you're as thick as shit, numskull.
Let's say you said I know this and I said, OK, well, how do you
know that? And you said, well, because of
(42:18):
this and you're going to you're going to list another belief
under that belief, right? Every time we say we have a
belief, it's supported by other beliefs that we have under it.
This guy sounds like he's been listening to side 10 Brugenkate
sermons on repeat. If you don't know who I'm
referring to, don't bother looking him up.
You're better off not knowing he's not worth your time.
(42:39):
Daniel is trying to make a case for a regress of layered belief,
where every belief sits on top of another and the only way to
make it stop is by having something that was always there,
in this case the Christian God. This appeal doesn't work because
as soon as you get to a methodology of testing things,
the regress halts. We know that gravity works
(42:59):
consistently because every time we test it, it behaves in
exactly the same way. We don't need infinite layered
beliefs to get there, and we certainly don't need to believe
in a God. Daniel's complaint is anti
intellectual shitty apologetics,which frankly is all that
Christianity. Offers.
And that keeps going down, you know, and eventually you hit
(43:20):
rock bottom. And the rock bottom that you hit
is these unjustified assumptions.
And there's no worse unjustifiedassumption than an invisible God
who refuses to show up. So if you stack a belief on top
of an unjustified assumption, well, that belief isn't
justified. And the scientific method exists
to get rid of that unjustification.
Daniel, use it. Fucking hell.
(43:44):
And all of our beliefs are stacked on these unjustified
assumptions. Wrong.
Which means none of our beliefs are justified.
And if none of our beliefs are justified, that means we don't
have any justification and therefore we have no knowledge,
because knowledge is justified true belief.
We should call this pretzel apologetics.
If we are starting from ourselves, if there is no God,
(44:07):
then knowledge becomes impossible.
However, that creates another problem.
To say that I know nothing or I can't know anything.
Those are actually knowledge claims, right?
And that's a contradiction. And that's definitely a you
problem, Daniel. That's like saying the truth is
that there is no truth. The truth is, there is no truth
in any of what Daniel says. It's a truth statement itself.
(44:30):
It's a contradiction. A contradiction that it exists
in Daniel's mind because of Daniel's twisted thinking it
doesn't exist in the real. World.
And that's a huge problem, because if atheism cannot know
anything, then that means that atheism is a contradiction.
And because I like repeating myself, atheism does not make
these claims. So Daniel's complaint is bogus.
(44:53):
If atheism leads to this contradiction, well then, but
it. Doesn't.
Atheism is false. And because atheism is a single
answer to a single question, it is not a true false belief or a
true false methodology or a truefalse philosophy.
It's an answer on a personal level.
Do you believe in a God? No, I don't.
You cannot pass that to be true or false.
(45:17):
Any knowledge entails necessarily an all knowing
being. If any knowledge exists
anywhere, then an all knowing being must exist, and that all
knowing being must be the sourceof how we have any knowledge at
all. If we have knowledge, then that
means that an all knowing being must necessarily exist.
(45:37):
Once I understood this about atheism and that it actually
just leads to a contradiction. It doesn't.
Well, then I realized that atheism was just absurd and that
God existed. I knew that if God existed, he
must be good, right? Because I believed in objective
morality. Still, I didn't believe that
morality was subjective. So if God does exist and he's
(46:00):
the source of objective moralityand I care about morality, well
then shouldn't I be serving God?And didn't he make me?
So if he's really someone that exists and made me, then
shouldn't I be on his side? Shouldn't I be serving him?
To me it seems like the answer was of course yes, should be.
(46:21):
And I when I talked to my mom about this and she had been
praying for me, she was so excited.
She said, why don't you just getdown on your knees and pray to
him now? And I said, well, I don't want
to yet, mom, because the truth was that I wanted to send more.
And just when you thought it couldn't get any more weird, it
just did. Something that we all kind of
understand intuitively, I think,is that to become a Christian
(46:45):
really is a form of death. And this kind of language is
exactly why I consider Christianity to be a bad faith
manipulative religion that is actually a cause of poor mental
well-being. The person that you are is no
longer there when you surrender to God.
(47:07):
You're no longer your own boss. No, you're no longer your own
boss. You become a slave to the
religion, or more accurately, a slave to the teaching of the
church which you attend. And it makes sense to me why so
many people hesitate, because that's what I did.
I hesitated. I waited three months after
this, three months of sin. And I wouldn't have put it that
(47:30):
way, but that's what it really was.
So not only can you not do atheism right, you can't do
Christianity right. You're just one great big shit
headed failure, aren't you Daniel?
Eventually I got down on my knees and I prayed for the first
time and I said, God, I know that if you exist and you do,
(47:51):
then you're good. And if you're good, then I want
to serve you. I want to give you my life.
Because a good God wants nothingmore than sycophantic worship
mongers constantly telling it how great it is and begging to
do what it wants them to do. It was a pretty simple prayer,
but it was a heartfelt prayer and I meant every word.
And it was night time and I looked up at the stars and I
(48:15):
just remember thinking, I've always known that God is real.
I've always known that he existed.
I've just been suppressing the truth.
Those that have seen Daniel's social media posts on atheism
will already know that a constant theme of his is the
bogus claim that there are no real atheists, that they all
know that God exists and that they just want to sin and
(48:38):
suppress their knowledge of God.Now we know why he says that He
is projecting his own bad reasoning onto others.
He can't possibly imagine that others will have a different
thought process to him or have different conclusions to him.
He judges everyone who disagreeswith him through the lens of his
own inadequacy. He was clearly a Dick while
(49:00):
claiming to be atheist and he isstill a Dick now.
And then after that, about two weeks after that, maybe a month,
I don't know, I heard the gospelabout what Jesus Christ had done
for us. How?
I'll spare you his tedious gospel revelation.
You don't need to hear it. I didn't care about people.
(49:23):
I was still a total narcissist, had no empathy for anybody, and
now I care about people. I even care about my enemies.
Really. Do you actually mean that?
Because the things that you say on social media do not give that
impression. So if this is nice, Daniel, wow,
Dick Daniel must have been a proper a proper a proper, a
(49:46):
proper bell end, that's what. I mean just Jesus Christ has
changed my life completely inside out.
Not seeing it. Really, really not seeing it.
One can't help but be impressed with it's been a such a thorough
transformation. Mind your heart, the way you
(50:08):
live, the way you think. Oh come on Jada, you can do
better than that. Ask some pointed questions.
You're supposed to be an interviewer, not a worshipper.
How would you encourage someone to take a next step forward, to
perhaps peer more closely at their own underlying
presumptions? You know about what they
(50:29):
believe, why they believe, and how they can ground it and
whether there's something more. Well, it's difficult because
most people, I believe what theybelieve is not based on reasons.
Does that include you, Daniel? Are you most people?
Most people, what they believe is based on what they want to be
(50:49):
true. Are you most people, Daniel?
And then they supplement their desire for what they want to be
true with reasons on top of it. Spoken like he was trained by an
apologist. And of course, people don't tell
you that this is what they're doing, but it is what most
people are doing. What a fantastic example of
(51:09):
projection. Do you really care about what's
true? Yes, that's why I do this.
Do you care about what's true nomatter what?
Still yes. Because if you seek for the
truth, I believe that you'll find the truth.
That's what Jesus said. And the truth set me free, free
from Christianity. Oh look, Rhyme.
(51:31):
And I follow Jesus, and he said,seek and ye shall find, and
don't give up. Really, Daniel, don't give up?
Exactly how long should we wait for God to fail to live up to
his promises? Really.
How long before it's reasonable to give up?
(51:52):
I sought the truth and it took me years to figure out that
Christianity was true. And for even more people, it
takes them years to figure out that Christianity is not only
not true, but actively harmful. But the most important thing
that we can do in this life is figure out why we're here.
(52:12):
It's a great big cosmic accident.
Deal with it now, move on and have fun.
Why are you here? That is the most important
question that we can ask and there is an answer to it.
And if you're not diligently pursuing that answer?
Who gets to define who's doing the right kind of diligent work?
(52:33):
Hey, Daniel, who is it you're going to pull a Dale Glover and
insist that you're the one who gets to decide whether or not
somebody's being a true seeker? So do you care about what's
true? Yes.
And if you do seek it? We did.
Look into the evidence for God. Hello.
(52:53):
We did. That's why we're where we are.
And that's why I'm so patient with atheists, because you just
never know what is going to affect somebody.
Oh boy, Daniel, your Twitter feed does not reflect what you
just said. What a numbscot.
You know, to any Christian out there that feels discouraged
(53:15):
because they talk to people and it seems like the people just
don't listen, don't give. Up to any Christian who has the
unfortunate instance of having to listen to this, well
congratulations on getting this far.
But before you even try to convince me of anything, first
try to understand where I am. Because if you fail to
(53:36):
understand where I am, I will not listen to you trying to tell
me where you are. You are someone who actually
engages obviously with atheist all the time you mentioned at
the very beginning, especially in your Twitter spaces.
Point of note, Daniel does not engage on his Twitter.
Maybe on his Twitter Spaces, butI doubt very much he talks at
(53:57):
atheists. He tells atheists what they
think based on his shitty experience.
But he is to not accurately represent what the
run-of-the-mill atheist believes.
He does not actually represent what the atheists interact with
him actually hold to or believe.And Daniel is not a good faith
communicator. Everything that he says about
(54:18):
other people is utter, utter bullshit.
It's projection of his own shitty personality and shitty
place. Daniel is not a good faith
actor, so whatever he says next to this question, disregard it.
Is there any other advice that you can give us as Christians as
to how to engage? I would just say that unbelief
(54:43):
is a matter of the heart, it's not a matter of the mind.
So even though I care deeply about all the reasons that I
have for why I'm a Christian, and I do share those reasons
quite often with atheists, my ultimate goal is to get to know
these atheists and to become friends with them.
(55:05):
I am absolutely not motivated tohave any level of friendship
with Daniel. Because that is really where we
need to be as Christians. It's not going to be an
argument, it's going to be a friendship that changes
someone's mind. There is very definitely some
truth to this. In all my time as a Christian,
the most effective way I saw of people coming into youth groups
(55:28):
or even as adults coming to church and eventually becoming
Christians was through friendship.
I don't think I ever saw somebody convert through an
argument or through evidence, but I did see a lot of people
convert through patient friendship.
They had friends who were Christians.
They came along because of thosefriends and they eventually
converted because of that. Peer pressure, so to speak, or
(55:52):
friendship pressure if you prefer to use that as an
expression. Friendship evangelism is a
thing, and it works. People will convert to
Christianity for their friends to maintain a friendship, and
sometimes even yes, for romanticsatisfaction.
There is such a thing as a titties conversion as well as
(56:13):
friendship conversion. Evidence arguments, like Daniel
just said tend to not work, which makes you wonder why
Daniel does what he does on thatTwitter place because it is not
friendship making that he does there.
It's going to be you caring about that person even though
they disagree with you. We can disagree about something
(56:34):
and still care about that person.
Thousands of broken marriages asa result of one partner de
converting. I would disagree with that.
The most important thing is to be patient and to pursue
friendships with people that youdon't agree with.
Hey Christian, if you want to befriends with me, by all means,
let's be friends. But if you try to evangelize me,
(56:57):
I will counter evangelize you. Let's have a fight over it.
Hopefully I can be a good witness.
Bad news, Daniel, you're not. There's no doubt in my mind,
Daniel, that your life is makinga difference.
Yeah, but not in the direction you think.
Jenna. Daniel, you are actively turning
people away from Christianity. Well done.
(57:21):
So you are a beautiful ambassador for Christ.
Really. Are you absolutely sure about
that? So thank you so much for for
coming on. I just so appreciate you.
Well, it was an absolute pleasure and honour to be here
and get to share my testimony and I hope that it can benefit
(57:44):
someone out there. Well, it certainly benefited me,
Daniel, but in ways that you would rather not realize.
Because I know what it's like tonot believe.
And it's awful. It's terrible.
You have no hope. Death is looming over you.
Wow, you are totally not explaining, not describing, not
(58:06):
comprehending anything that I ormy fellow atheists experience.
I pity you. Thanks for having me, Jenna.
Thanks for tuning into the Egg Sceptic podcast to hear Daniel's
story. Thoughts for those who have made
it this far. This podcast did not shift my
(58:27):
lingering doubts over Daniel being a genuine believer.
That residual 10% hesitancy still exists for someone who
claims in his ex bio to be a lifelong atheist who converted.
Daniel's story does not match that claim, and his
justifications are essentially wishful thinking.
Daniel's insistence on projecting his faults onto
(58:49):
atheists is tedious, and that hethinks he is engaging with
atheists thoughtfully is damn right laughable in his
fortuitousness. And this is genuinely the most
intense self delusion I have ever seen, which is why there is
still some part of me that thinks Daniel is really a troll.
(59:09):
I'd be interested to know what you think.
So until next time, be reasoned.You have been listening to a
podcast from Reason Press. Do you have any thoughts on what
you've just heard? Do you have a topic that you
(59:30):
would like us to cover? Please send all feedback to
reasonpress@gmail.com. You might even appear on an
episode. Our theme music was written for
us by Holly. To hear more of her music, see
the links in our show notes.
Daniel fails to dismount on atheism.
This is Matthew, and in this episode of Still Unbelievable,
I'll be reviewing another conversion story.
This one features Daniel, who isknown as Darwin to Jesus, on
that hive of shittiness formerlyknown as Twitter.
Daniel's takes on matters of religion and atheism are bad, So
(00:26):
bad that there are many who actually think he's a troll
parodying the worst of religion.My confidence that he is a real
Christian is about 90%, the 10% in reserve.
It's because there are times I do wonder if he is a very clever
troll. The main reason I think he isn't
is because I don't think a trollcould keep it up for as long as
(00:47):
he has. Therefore, I'm inclined to
believe he's the real deal, which makes the things he says
worthy of my special brand of sarcastic retort, which I will
be employing by the bucket in this episode.
Because the things Daniel says are genuinely pathetic and any
Christian who gives his stupidity a platform deserves
(01:09):
ridicule. The episode I'm responding to is
link one in the show notes and it's from the podcast Ex
Sceptic. Yes, there really is a podcast
called Ex Sceptic featuring versions of Christianity that
actually celebrate turning away from sceptical thought.
(01:30):
It's as though they are no longer ashamed of unreasonable
credulity. If I wasn't so busy rolling my
eyes I'd actually find time to pity the food.
Goes home crying to his Mama. Get that done, let's get on with
the shit show. In our story today, former
atheist Daniel was seeking substantive answers to his
(01:51):
looming questions that simple faith did not seem to provide.
That's the voice of Janna Harman, the host of the Ex
Skeptic podcast introducing Daniel.
And yes, you really did hear herrefer to atheism as simple
faith. The dumbness really does start
before the opening Jingle has finished.
(02:11):
Daniel is a bold and winsome advocate for Jesus Christ with a
strong online presence on Twitter X as Darwin to Jesus,
where he thoughtfully engages with those who reject belief.
In God, I really should have dugout a laugh or a groan sound
effect for that, but I don't want to overuse them.
(02:32):
No, Daniel is not thoughtful. Anybody who's read any of his
tweets will realise that he is not thoughtful.
Thoughtful is the last thing that Daniel ever could be.
But you'll also hear his wise and practical advice to both.
No, I give up. I just can't take it anymore.
(02:52):
Laugh. Sound effect engaged already.
I'm sure there'll be more. Welcome to the Ex Skeptic
podcast, Daniel. It's great to have you with me
today. It's such a great honour to be
here with you Jenna, and so wonderful to meet you.
As we're getting started, I'd love for the listeners to know a
little bit about you. I am a Christian.
(03:13):
I am passionate about Christianity and about my
relationship with Jesus Christ and I am a former atheist.
I consider myself to have been alifelong atheist.
And right now, one of the thingsI primarily do, I have a Twitter
account named Darwin to Jesus. And I'm trying to outreach to
(03:34):
atheists and I'm challenging them.
And a lot of them may not like me, you know, and, and I felt
the same way about apologists when I was an atheist.
But I'm engaging with them, trying to have conversations
with them and. 90% of the posts on Daniel's Twitter feed are
shitty memes. You don't start conversations
(03:55):
with shitty memes. Here is 1, which is not a meme.
Most atheists are upset with Godbecause they think they should
have his job. That's why they complain so much
about how the world is. Daniel, you don't have
conversations by posting things like that.
The idea is to lead them to Jesus Christ, leave them to the
(04:17):
Savior. And one of the things I started
doing recently is Twitter Spaces, where it's basically an
open chat room. And I invite an atheist in to
come talk to me for about two hours and we talk about my
reasons for why I believe in Godand we talk about their reasons
for why they don't believe in God.
And. And yet, having allegedly done
(04:38):
that, he still fails utterly andmiserably to actually represent
what atheism or atheists are. What a turd.
The whole point is just to create an atmosphere where it's
not a debate, it's just a friendly conversation.
And yet Daniel utterly fails to do friendly on his actual
(05:00):
Twitter feed. I've not been to one of those
spaces. Maybe I will try and sit in on
one. We'll see about that, but I'm
not encouraged to because Danielis decidedly unfriendly.
In this day of tribalism and us,the mentality, Daniel, it's so
great that you have a place thatis conducive to just congenial
(05:21):
conversation. Daniel's Twitter feed is not
conducive to congenial conversation, Not at all.
Go and have a look, Jenna. You'll see for yourself.
All right, why don't you paint apicture for us?
Because obviously that atheism didn't come out of nowhere.
Let's find out a little bit about how you were raised and
(05:44):
how you were raised to think about God and your world as a
child. Absolutely.
So if you asked my mom and dad about me becoming an atheist,
they would have said it absolutely came out of nowhere
because I was raised Christian. I was raised Pentecostal.
And there we have the seeds. Before Daniel took on the label
(06:06):
atheist, he already had a foundation of fundamentalist
Christianity. We'll see how his story builds,
but I'm willing to bet that those seeds that he was
indoctrinated with as a child will show in how he reports on
his atheist phase. And for anyone who doesn't know
what that means, essentially Pentecostals are the ones that
(06:28):
put their hands up in the air during the worship hour.
Only an hour. Fucking lightweight.
One of the things that my mom says, and I, I believe that it's
true, but I don't remember this,is that I even got baptized when
I was about six or seven years old, she says.
I went to a Christian camp during the summer and got
baptized there and came back andI was on fire for God.
I did a decade of leading on a Christian summer camp.
(06:52):
Yeah, the pressure put on those kids.
Not good. Not good at all.
I have a terrible memory and I don't remember any of that.
What I remember is always hatinggoing to church.
Fool you man, I didn't always enjoy church as a kid either.
Still ends up on fire for God though.
And my parents would make me go to church every Sunday.
(07:15):
Unfortunately, my father called himself a Christian and he did
not act very much like a Christian.
And I think that looking back, that probably had a lot to do
with some of the choices that I made in my life as far as how I
felt about God and where I endedup going at certain points.
Because I think that a father and how he represents Christ to
(07:39):
his children is really going to affect their view of God.
Because my father was abusive and he was intimidating and he
was just not a kind man to myself or my mom or my brother
or my sister. It really did not impress me
that he called himself Christianbecause he was really just a
(08:01):
hypocrite and I was not impressed with Christianity as a
result of that. Interesting shifting of the
blame there. My own dad could be a bit of a
Dick sometimes as well. I spent most of my teenage years
not being impressed by him. Still stayed on fire for God
though. I can't blame him for leaving.
Wasn't my dad's fault. As I got older, there were
(08:24):
questions when I was 10/11/12 about Christianity that I had
and I would ask these questions and my mom and dad just couldn't
answer them. I would ask questions about, you
know, things like, well, if God is all knowing, then how is it
that we have free will? Which is a good question and I
(08:45):
get asked that now, but. It is a good question.
Well I doubt that 10 year olds come up with it.
I think Daniel is misrememberinghis timeline here.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone in their teens asked
this, but in 20 years of runningyouth groups, including the
aforementioned 10 years of summer camp, I never had this
question from a preteen. But Daniel is prone to elevating
(09:08):
his own importance, so this statement is on par for his ego.
It's a question that I I would ask my mom and she would say you
just have to have faith. And that started to really rub
me the wrong way because I started thinking to myself,
well, people in India, you know,children in India are raised in
(09:29):
a different religion. And they probably have
questions, like I'm having questions.
And what are they told? Are they told you just need to
have faith? Because what they believe and
what I believe are not the same thing.
If I'm right, then they're wrong.
And if they're right, then I'm wrong.
So it seems like just have faithisn't really going to cut it.
(09:49):
It seems like we need some way to know if what we believe is
true. I agree having faith isn't good
enough. I need a reason to believe
something is true, and somethingas important as what Christians
claim needs a very convincing line of evidence.
Because if what they believe is true, I might be in big trouble.
(10:10):
And if what I believe is true, then they're definitely in big
trouble. Yeah, because there's nothing
quite as loving as a God that would destroy you for daring to
believe the wrong thing. If you have young children or
teenagers, I would really encourage you to study
apologetics and try to have answers.
Because there's nothing like a bit of post hoc rationalisation
(10:31):
of your own evidenced belief in order to aid in your
indoctrination of young people who have not yet grasped the
concept of critical thinking. It should be able to hold up the
scrutiny if it's true. I agree, and that's why I look
dimly on apologetics. I want evidence that can be
tested, not arguments that lead to a predetermined conclusion.
(10:53):
About the age of 15 or 16, I went to church with my mom for
the last time. We we drove there and I got out
of the car and I looked at my mom and I said, I'm not going in
there, I'm going to walk home and you can't make me go to
church. And I knew that it was true
because I was bigger than her, and she knew that it was true.
(11:15):
And after that, I didn't go to church anymore.
And once I stopped going to church, that's when I really
started to get into atheism. Because before that I was more
just, I don't like to go to church.
And I don't think that Christianity is true.
But when I stopped going to church, I started looking up
atheist videos online, and I started hearing arguments that
(11:38):
were against Christianity. And a lot of those arguments I
thought were really, really good.
Do you have any examples of those arguments, Daniel?
I grew up in the time where the four horsemen of atheism were
very popular. So those horsemen were Harris,
Hitchens, Dennett and Dawkins. And my favorite of the four
(12:02):
horsemen was Hitchens by far. I thought that he was just
brilliant. I thought that he won all of the
debates that he was in, which isfunny because now when I go back
and I listen to the debates thathe did, he really didn't do very
well at all. It was mostly rhetoric.
This is why I'm not a fan of thedebate format.
(12:23):
Yes, a well formed argument doeshave the power to change
someone's mind, but it's not as successful as we like to
imagine. Debates are more successful at
affirming what we already believe, especially if it is a
belief with little evidential foundation.
Daniel's view on the debate performance has changed to align
(12:44):
with his beliefs. This is why I asked for a
methodology for validating a belief.
Arguments do not impress me. I got really, really deep into
atheism. I got really passionate about
it. Started pushing back on my mom
while I still live there. Became even more of a terror to
her because now I was asking questions, not in good faith,
but to try to destroy her world view, to destroy her faith
(13:08):
because I thought it was bad. Once you become the type of
atheist that I was, you feel like you're smarter than pretty
much everybody else. And then you're unfamiliar with
Daniels online presence. On that Twitter website, he
still gives off that vibe. It seems that this behavior is
inherent in Daniel's shitty personality.
You feel like you've figured outsomething that nobody else
(13:31):
knows. You figured out that God isn't
real, and everybody believes that God is real.
So they're all wrong. Everybody's being duped.
But you figured it out. So you're you're a lot smarter
than everybody else because they're all being fooled and you
figured out the truth. That's all you, Daniel.
The deconstruction groups that I'm a part of do not have that
kind of personality in them. And it's very much a superior
(13:56):
way of thinking. Lack of epistemic humility is
definitely a Daniel problem. I definitely thought of myself
as being better than others and I had very little empathy for
other people. And you still don't.
I thought that all of the world's problems came from
religion, and I thought that we needed to destroy religion and
(14:17):
usher in the great atheist utopia of reason.
Reason is certainly better than faith, but fundamentalist
absolutist thinking is bad no matter what side holds it.
That's how a lot of atheists think.
Misrepresenting others is bad. OK, my research.
I found that to be a very prominent characteristic is a
sense of intellectual superiority.
(14:39):
The research that Jenna is referring to is a PhD that she's
done on people deconstructing ordeconverting.
Maybe I should dig that out and have a read of it and see what
she actually does say in it. So you said that you were a
passionate atheist for 45 years.What happened from there?
Well, I stayed pretty passionateafter that, but at about the
(15:00):
four to five year mark, something happened that really
shook me up. This was 2012 and what I saw was
the Bill Maher show. And it was Sam Harris was
talking with Bill Maher. He was on his show and he was
talking to Ben Affleck. Sam Harris was saying as
(15:20):
rational atheist, we should be more against Muslims than we are
against Christianity because Muslims are way more
conservative. They also believe in God and
they're committing terrorism allover the world, which Christians
aren't doing. See link at 2 for the video that
Daniel is referring to. There is a very valid point
here. Islam is a shitty religion in
(15:43):
the world today. Islam is responsible for more
oppression and more harm than Christianity.
The core tenets of some forms ofIslam are far worse than the
worst of Christianity. This is all true.
Why don't I spend my time critiquing Islam?
Because Islam is not part of my life or my culture.
(16:04):
I have not spent any part of my life being harmed by Islam.
Islam being crap does not mean that Christianity gets a pass.
Christianity is still shit in places and those aspects deserve
critique. And because it is part of my
life, I focus on what I know. The next morning, after this had
(16:26):
happened, about half of the atheists sided with Ben Affleck
and not Sam Harris. And that really, really
surprised me because I thought that Sam Harris was obviously
correct. To see them side with him really
surprised me because I thought that atheists were these
(16:47):
enlightened beings like myself. We had figured out something no
one else knew. We had seen through the veil.
And yet here are these atheists that don't even understand that
Islam is more conservative than Christians, than Christianity.
So if you're going to be againstChristianity for being
conservative and religious, why would you be less against
(17:10):
another religion that is more conservative and also religious
and more violent? This was the beginning of a
split in the atheist community. I've not fact checked this point
by Daniel. Maybe he's right, or maybe he's
overstated the response. For the sake of this commentary,
I'm going to accept that he's being accurate because it
(17:32):
doesn't change the fact that Christianity is still deserving
of critique and still makes claims that are not evidence
based. And the split was basically the
true liberals, like I consider myself to be, versus the people
that had gone off the deep end. And I didn't know what those
people were doing, but I knew that they were wrong.
(17:54):
It was something that really shook me up.
And I started to ask questions because I I became a little bit
unnerved about my atheism to seethat.
Sorry, what? Some people failing to critique
Islam deservedly made you question your commitment to
atheism? Really.
(18:17):
Is that how weak minded you really are?
Really. OK.
The next thing that really kind of changed the way that I
perceived all of this, because now I considered myself a
classical liberal, There was this Crossfitter that I really
respected. He was the number one
Crossfitter in the world, and his name was Rich Froning.
(18:38):
He was just a really good sportsman, a man of character.
He would help people when they finished.
One day I was watching a Netflixdocumentary about Rich Froning
and I saw that he was there withhis family and I was just
thinking, what a great guy. I'd like to be like this guy
someday. As I'm watching, he sits down
(19:01):
with his family to eat and what do they do?
They prayed. And as soon as I saw him pray, I
thought to myself, oh, he's justa stupid Christian.
And I completely dismissed him. I completely dismissed him out
of my mind. I had no more respect for him in
that moment. But then I thought, why am I
(19:23):
dismissing him? If I were, say, deployed right,
would I want somebody like Rich Froning with me?
Or would I want all the atheiststhat I know that I'm used to
talking with, that I'm used to dealing with?
Would I trust any of them, or would I rather have Rich
Froning? And the answer was obviously I
(19:47):
would prefer to have someone like Rich Froning.
Based on what? Because you saw him pray with
his children over a meal? Or because you saw that his
children like him? What do either of those two
qualities have when it comes to being in service somewhere?
Seems that there's an odd criteria going on here.
And I'm not saying every atheistis low character.
(20:09):
Sounds like you are Daniel, and that's certainly the impression
you give on your Twitter feed. But pretty much every atheist
that I knew was, and I knew quite a few.
Oh, that warm, comforting glow of good old fashioned Christian
humility. And I think that that's pretty
darn typical. When I would interact with them
(20:29):
personally or when it was just us atheists, the only things we
we would be talking about or they would want to talk about
wasn't philosophy, it wasn't what was true.
It was women, drugs and other degenerate things that I don't
really want to specify. Sounds like it was the crowd
that you were mixing with Daniel, not atheists
(20:51):
specifically. So I did not have a very high
opinion of my fellow atheists. And when I realized that Rich
Froning was someone that I really looked up to and
respected, it actually shifted the way that I thought about
Christians, because up until that point I thought of them as
the bad guys. But in that moment when I
(21:12):
realized that I'd rather have Rich Froning with me than 1000
atheists, it really changed my window.
My the Overton Window completelyshifted of in regards to
Christianity and atheism and theway that I saw them, and it made
me start to see Christianity as something that was important to
our society. Basically, Daniel is admitting
(21:33):
here that he was mixed in with questionable characters and he
associated their behaviour with atheism specifically, and that
he looked up to someone who turned out to be a Christian and
that caused his world view to shift.
That's probably not unusual. This is the power of personal
witness, and if he'd been mixingwith a more balanced group of
people he might have had a different response.
(21:55):
Daniel doesn't give his age here, but given that he said he
turned atheist in his teens and that this was about five years
later, this would put him in hisearly 20s, which is basically
the age when lads hang around with other lads and generally
act like Dicks. This isn't an atheism thing,
it's a male thing. If the atheists that I knew were
(22:15):
going to become more popular, and if people like Rich Froning
became less popular and eventually became extinct, well,
what would a world of the atheists that I knew be like?
It'd be terrible. Sure, a world with more shit
people and less good people would be a terrible world.
That's not to do with religion or atheism, though.
(22:36):
I would not want to live in thatworld.
But by being the really shitty Christian witness that you are,
that is the world you're attempting to create.
And. When you start to realize that,
you start to think, well, I wantto live in a world with
Christians because these are thepeople that I can depend on.
When you compare a bunch of red blooded high jinxed 20 year old
(22:59):
American males with one individual adult with a family
who turns out to be decent and then also a Christian, you're
going to end up with a completely 1 sided view which is
terribly inaccurate. You know, I want to live in a
world with Rich Froning's. I have no idea who Rich Froning
(23:20):
is, but let's imagine that he isthe decent chap that Daniel says
he is. Great.
That being true, yes, I want to live in a world where every man
is that nice, that decent, that good, that respectable, that
admirable. But that is not the world we
live in, and it is certainly notthe world that all Christians
are like, wow, is that really what got him to convert to
(23:45):
Christianity? Shit.
You had this negative view, thisnegative view of Christians, but
you met someone who countered that, who disrupted that
negative stereotype that you hadbuilt in your mind.
I love that. Why, Jenna, why do you love
that? One decent person who happens to
(24:06):
hold to a specific world view isenough to adopt that world view?
Really. I've met nice Muslims.
I have no intention whatsoever of becoming a Muslim.
Why does one nice person make anentire worldview worthy of
respect and adoption? A lot of people don't recognise
(24:27):
that the Christian worldview is really substantive and helped
build our civil society. Hundreds of years of social
domination, introduction of slavery, Oppression of those
unwilling to conform, murdering those from other cultures,
forced conversion. The list of shitty things that
Christianity did in order to maintain itself as a dominating
(24:48):
force is depressing. A good witness can actually
change the way that someone elseviews you.
That is true, and so is the opposite.
So tell me, Daniel, why do so many atheists think that you're
an absolute shit? So I basically became a lot more
conservative after that because I realized that these
(25:09):
conservative values that Christians were in favour of
were really the things that werekeeping our society going.
So you swapped one type of dickishness for another type of
dickishness. So maybe this guy who you think
is so great isn't so great afterall.
But I thought that what they believed still wasn't true.
(25:31):
I didn't think that there was any good reason to believe in
God. One of those reasons, the main
reason why I didn't think that there was any good reason to
believe in God was because I wascalling myself an empiricist.
And I said, you know, I don't believe that God exists because
I've never seen God As you show me God, I'll believe in God
until I'm able to perceive God, until you give me sense data,
(25:55):
evidence, I'm not going to believe it.
Well, that almost sounds reasonable.
The guy's saying he's looking for evidence, but he specified
sense data. It's almost as though he doesn't
realise that our senses can be manipulated, can be deceived.
I wonder if he's sort of coming up with a way of excluding our
(26:16):
senses and yet coming up with anobjective, testable, reliable,
validatable result. That was my quote UN quote
epistemology. I was saying I don't have any
sensory evidence of God, so I don't believe in God.
The next big thing that really kind of changed my views on
(26:38):
things was that I talked to my cousin about why conservatives
and liberals had these differentways of looking at the world,
and he said you need to read this book.
And the book was The Righteous Mind.
See link at three. The book The Righteous Mind by
(27:01):
Jonathan Haidt appears to be critically acclaimed and very
well received, and it makes somefairly good points.
Follow the link and read about it yourself.
So I went, I read the book and the main next part of my story
is I went into a chat room. There were a bunch of atheists
in there and I was just going tolisten to what they had to say.
(27:24):
And they were interested in talking to me because they
hadn't seen me in there before. I started talking with them, and
they wanted to ask me some questions and see if I was
intelligent or not. I guess eventually one of the
topics that came up was morality.
And I made it known that I thought that rape was wrong,
(27:44):
something along those lines. And they said, well, what do you
mean that rape is wrong? And I said, you know, it's
wrong. It's, it's immoral.
And they they said like, actually wrong, objectively
wrong. And I said, yeah, of course.
And they said, you really think that you can account for
objective moral values and duties if there is no God.
And I said, of course, but I hadn't really given it much
(28:07):
thought. And they basically schooled me
about morality and they told me we really can't justify
objective morality at all because in order to justify
objective morality, you need some type of actual objective
goal giver. You need meaning, you need
purpose, you need objective values like goodness and
(28:30):
vadnais. So anyway, they kind of went
through some of this stuff with me.
I thought that they were completely wrong.
I thought that atheism absolutely could account for
objective moral values and duties, and I thought it was the
most ridiculous thing in the world that they couldn't see
that. And I was not about to say that
morality was subjective, becauseto me that is always been
(28:54):
absolutely ridiculous. I've always known that there is
such a thing as actual right andwrong, and I set out to prove
them wrong because I still thought the atheism was true.
But I definitely did not think that morality was subjective.
So I tried for about two to three years to figure out a way
(29:18):
to account for objective moral values and duties without God
from an atheist point of view, and the more I studied it, the
more I realized that it's just not something that can really be
done. I have no idea what study Daniel
did over those two years or whathe was looking for, but there
(29:38):
are multiple excellent articles on objective secular morality.
C link 4 for an example. There are good points to be made
in the case for a godless objective morality.
One example would be the case ofcooperation within a group.
In order for a group to work productively together there must
(29:58):
be an element of behavioural trust.
Things like telling the truth, not trying to cheat others,
general positive ethical behaviour.
In other words, acting to a specific set of moral standards
that is not explicitly written down.
It is fair to call these objective in the sense that the
group innately knows to abide bythem, and no God is required for
(30:23):
us to know what they are. It's anyone's guess why Daniel
found it so hard to find this information.
I expect that his formative upbringing in a Christian home
was instrumental in his thinkinghere.
Atheists or atheism simply cannot account for objective
moral values and duties. Well, for starters, atheism
(30:45):
doesn't pretend to explain this.For that you need secular
humanism, and that explains it very well.
If Daniel is looking for the answer in atheism, he is doing
it wrong. And when I realised this, it
really shook me because I thought that atheism was true.
But how can atheism be true if it can't account for other
(31:06):
things that I think are just as true, like that rape is wrong,
or that murder is wrong and these types of things?
I know you don't need me to, butI'll repeat myself anyway.
Atheism doesn't say any of thosethings.
All it is is a single position on the single question.
Is there a God? For everything else there is
secular humanism or another philosophy if you prefer.
(31:29):
Anyone looking to atheism to answer those questions for them
is simply looking in all the wrong places.
And just for clarity, you're notsaying that that people who
don't believe in God can't know what is good, but they just
can't find a basis for that, right?
Essentially, yes. Wrong.
If there is no God, then goodness and vadnais don't
(31:50):
exist. Wrong.
So I'm not saying that if you don't believe in God, you can't
be a good person. I'm saying that if God doesn't
exist, there's no such thing as good or bad people.
There's no such thing as how we ought to be.
If there is no God, then whatever I want to do, I can do,
(32:10):
and it just is what I'm doing. There's no value about it, and a
lot of atheists, like you said, do misunderstand this argument.
Oh, we understand it. You're just wrong and it's your
failure to understand how there is morality beyond your God.
And they think that you're saying that atheists are just
bad and immoral people because they don't believe in God.
(32:31):
And that's not what I'm arguing.I'm saying that the existence of
goodness and vadnais cannot exist unless God exists.
These things are. The problem for Daniel here and
all theists that make a similar claim is that goodness and
vadnais do not exist. Good and bad, evil,
(32:52):
righteousness, whatever you wantto say.
They are just labels that we useto describe something that we
agree with or don't agree with. They don't exist as entities.
There isn't a goodness entity floating around in the universe
that touches us and helps us to behave.
It's just a label that we give about things that we like.
This threw me for a loop, and itmade me start to look at atheism
(33:16):
differently than I had before inanother very significant way.
Because before I looked at atheists differently, but now I
was looking at the atheism itself, the idea that there is
no God differently. And I was realizing that there
were entailments to this worldview, that there were
consequences to it. And I never realized that
before. I had never realized that there
(33:37):
were consequences to my worldview and that I had a
worldview. And once I realized that, oh,
atheism can't get me objective morality.
Because it doesn't attempt to. If you're going to look for
answers in atheism that atheism doesn't even promise, then you
are going to be disappointed. But that's not the fault of
(33:59):
atheism. That's the fault of you and your
expectations. And that's absurd.
It made me start to question what else atheism couldn't get
me. Nothing.
There's nothing it can get you, because atheism is a single
response to a single question. Do I believe there is a God?
No. Great.
(34:20):
I'm atheist. That does not give me anything
else. Not anything philosophical, not
anything scientific, because that is not what it's meant to
do. Numbskull.
Are there things that I'm believing as an atheist that I
really have no right to believe in?
As an atheist, I believe that PCis better than Mac.
(34:40):
Oh no, the world has ended. And so I started to actually
critically look at my beliefs asan atheist.
We should all be prepared to critically examine the things
that we believe. I was an empiricist.
I needed you to show me whateveryou wanted me to believe in.
I'm saying it's logical to use my senses in order to perceive
(35:02):
the world, and if I don't perceive something in the world
I I shouldn't believe in it. It's not quite that simple.
It's not limited just to our senses.
Experimental data is very important when it comes to
scientific progress and having evidence of the existence of
things. We can't see, touch, or feel a
black hole, but there is other sensory and evidential data that
(35:25):
we can use to determine that they exist.
That's appealing to logic, right?
That's a form of argument right there.
If you say so, but I'm getting the tingly senses that there's a
straw man approaching. So I clearly must believe that
logic exists. Exists as what?
You can't detect it using any ofyour senses, so how do you
(35:46):
believe that logic exists? What form does it take, Daniel?
I'd never seen logic. I'm appealing to it.
There are three laws of logic. As defined by humans.
I believe that they existed, andyet I had never held any of
these laws in my hand. So these laws that I believed
in, that I was appealing to, they didn't exist in a material
(36:10):
way. And yet here I was, calling
myself a materialist. Materialist or empiricist?
Well, what a materialist believe.
They believe that everything is made of matter.
Or is dependent on matter. Thinking isn't matter, but
thinking requires matter. Well, if I believe that
everything is made of matter. You'd be an idiot or you'd be
(36:31):
lying about your past beliefs. Then why am I believing in
something that isn't made of matter?
That doesn't make sense. No, it doesn't.
And it is very much a you problem, Daniel.
So what should I do? Stop talking, turn off your
computer and go home to your mother.
And it wasn't just the laws of logic.
(36:51):
I mean, numbers also are not made of matter, and yet I
believe that the #7 exists. Oh no, there's #7 hell, that
means atheism is false. Fucking hell, could this guy get
any more dim? So you've got a lot of different
types of things that are immaterial and that I believed
in. Welcome to being a grown up,
(37:12):
Daniel. None of that validates your
stupid mythological belief. So it's at this point that I
went into Discord to talk to an atheist friend of mine.
I brought these problems up to him and I said, hey, if we're
atheists and we're empiricists and we're materialists, why are
(37:33):
we believing in things like lawsof logic?
Why are we believing in things like numbers?
Seriously, this is so dumb it's beyond laughable.
It's things like this that make others think that Daniel is a
troll, seeing how far he can push Christian stupidity until
it cracks. Either way, Jana should know
better than to allow this sort of bullshit to fly without push
(37:53):
back. When a genuine Christian like
Jana allows this level of idiocyto go unchecked, then she kills
her own credibility. Not that she really had any with
a podcast name like Ex Skeptic, but you get my point.
And what he said to me, I will never forget as long as I live,
he said. If you keep asking questions
(38:17):
like this, you will not be an atheist much longer.
Yeah, the friend was right. You ask dumb questions like
that, you're going to open yourself up to any really stupid
belief. I was really taken aback by that
and very, very disappointed. What?
Else did your friend say Daniel?Did he put you right on the
stupidity of your question, or have you failed to tell us the
(38:39):
rest of the conversation? I mean, I felt, now that I think
about it, I felt a lot like I had when my mom would answer
questions that I had about Christianity.
You know, you just have to have faith.
Well, he's saying stop asking these questions, basically.
Really, I'm going to call bullshit on this one because
Daniel's history of misrepresentation and outright
(39:02):
lies on his social media tells me that I should not trust his
reporting of this conversation. That just made me want to ask
more questions. I've always wanted to know what
the truth was. And so did all the people who
left Christianity because after being tested, Christianity
failed. So when he said you're asking a
(39:24):
good questions and you should stop.
Sticking my neck out. What was probably said was
you're asking the wrong questions because atheism does
not say anything to those questions.
That made me want to ask even more questions, and so that's
what I did. Asking more questions is not in
itself a bad thing, in fact, I highly encourage it.
(39:46):
But if you're seeking answers from a source that is not
equipped to give those answers, or is not designed to give those
answers, then you're looking foranswers in the wrong places and
one of the things that Christianity is especially good
at. Is making up bullshit answers
for areas where it really has nobusiness.
So if confidence in answers is what you're looking for,
(40:08):
Christianity might be the place for you.
But it is not a source of truth.I guess the next really big
thing, and this was probably thebiggest thing that really showed
me that I was wrong and that atheism was not true, was the
problem of knowledge. We have a very bad feeling about
this. Atheism leads to a contradiction
(40:30):
because atheism cannot account for any knowledge whatsoever.
When you spend your time lookingfor answers in the wrong places,
the only thing you're going to find is disappointment.
When I say knowledge, I mean a belief that is true and that we
have a justification for. And since atheism is simply the
answer to a single question about belief in God, and it is
(40:53):
actually science and the methodologies behind it that
give us justifications, Daniel'sbeen looking in the wrong
places. No wonder he's confused, missed
up, fucked up and damn right stupid.
The reason why atheists cannot account for knowledge is because
they have to start with themselves.
Wait, are you critiquing atheismor atheists?
(41:14):
Because atheists account for knowledge by, as I mentioned
earlier, the scientific method ignored philosophies surrounding
it. Because there is no transcendent
mind in their belief system. So in their belief system, any
truth has to come to them via whatever resources they just are
(41:35):
made with. Which is true of everybody who
has ever existed, including yourself, Daniel.
Though resources we are made with is a little bit of a weird
way to phrase things because humans have got their own
ingenuity. Humans have created a
methodology, we call it science,which helps us to test and
validate and confirm things. And that is what is the basis of
(41:58):
all the knowledge that we have. This is what we have to use when
it comes to knowledge. You need to have actual
justification. Yes, that is why science exists,
Daniel. And if there is no God, I don't
believe that you can justify anybelief whatsoever.
And that is why you're as thick as shit, numskull.
Let's say you said I know this and I said, OK, well, how do you
know that? And you said, well, because of
(42:18):
this and you're going to you're going to list another belief
under that belief, right? Every time we say we have a
belief, it's supported by other beliefs that we have under it.
This guy sounds like he's been listening to side 10 Brugenkate
sermons on repeat. If you don't know who I'm
referring to, don't bother looking him up.
You're better off not knowing he's not worth your time.
(42:39):
Daniel is trying to make a case for a regress of layered belief,
where every belief sits on top of another and the only way to
make it stop is by having something that was always there,
in this case the Christian God. This appeal doesn't work because
as soon as you get to a methodology of testing things,
the regress halts. We know that gravity works
(42:59):
consistently because every time we test it, it behaves in
exactly the same way. We don't need infinite layered
beliefs to get there, and we certainly don't need to believe
in a God. Daniel's complaint is anti
intellectual shitty apologetics,which frankly is all that
Christianity. Offers.
And that keeps going down, you know, and eventually you hit
(43:20):
rock bottom. And the rock bottom that you hit
is these unjustified assumptions.
And there's no worse unjustifiedassumption than an invisible God
who refuses to show up. So if you stack a belief on top
of an unjustified assumption, well, that belief isn't
justified. And the scientific method exists
to get rid of that unjustification.
Daniel, use it. Fucking hell.
(43:44):
And all of our beliefs are stacked on these unjustified
assumptions. Wrong.
Which means none of our beliefs are justified.
And if none of our beliefs are justified, that means we don't
have any justification and therefore we have no knowledge,
because knowledge is justified true belief.
We should call this pretzel apologetics.
If we are starting from ourselves, if there is no God,
(44:07):
then knowledge becomes impossible.
However, that creates another problem.
To say that I know nothing or I can't know anything.
Those are actually knowledge claims, right?
And that's a contradiction. And that's definitely a you
problem, Daniel. That's like saying the truth is
that there is no truth. The truth is, there is no truth
in any of what Daniel says. It's a truth statement itself.
(44:30):
It's a contradiction. A contradiction that it exists
in Daniel's mind because of Daniel's twisted thinking it
doesn't exist in the real. World.
And that's a huge problem, because if atheism cannot know
anything, then that means that atheism is a contradiction.
And because I like repeating myself, atheism does not make
these claims. So Daniel's complaint is bogus.
(44:53):
If atheism leads to this contradiction, well then, but
it. Doesn't.
Atheism is false. And because atheism is a single
answer to a single question, it is not a true false belief or a
true false methodology or a truefalse philosophy.
It's an answer on a personal level.
Do you believe in a God? No, I don't.
You cannot pass that to be true or false.
(45:17):
Any knowledge entails necessarily an all knowing
being. If any knowledge exists
anywhere, then an all knowing being must exist, and that all
knowing being must be the sourceof how we have any knowledge at
all. If we have knowledge, then that
means that an all knowing being must necessarily exist.
(45:37):
Once I understood this about atheism and that it actually
just leads to a contradiction. It doesn't.
Well, then I realized that atheism was just absurd and that
God existed. I knew that if God existed, he
must be good, right? Because I believed in objective
morality. Still, I didn't believe that
morality was subjective. So if God does exist and he's
(46:00):
the source of objective moralityand I care about morality, well
then shouldn't I be serving God?And didn't he make me?
So if he's really someone that exists and made me, then
shouldn't I be on his side? Shouldn't I be serving him?
To me it seems like the answer was of course yes, should be.
(46:21):
And I when I talked to my mom about this and she had been
praying for me, she was so excited.
She said, why don't you just getdown on your knees and pray to
him now? And I said, well, I don't want
to yet, mom, because the truth was that I wanted to send more.
And just when you thought it couldn't get any more weird, it
just did. Something that we all kind of
understand intuitively, I think,is that to become a Christian
(46:45):
really is a form of death. And this kind of language is
exactly why I consider Christianity to be a bad faith
manipulative religion that is actually a cause of poor mental
well-being. The person that you are is no
longer there when you surrender to God.
(47:07):
You're no longer your own boss. No, you're no longer your own
boss. You become a slave to the
religion, or more accurately, a slave to the teaching of the
church which you attend. And it makes sense to me why so
many people hesitate, because that's what I did.
I hesitated. I waited three months after
this, three months of sin. And I wouldn't have put it that
(47:30):
way, but that's what it really was.
So not only can you not do atheism right, you can't do
Christianity right. You're just one great big shit
headed failure, aren't you Daniel?
Eventually I got down on my knees and I prayed for the first
time and I said, God, I know that if you exist and you do,
(47:51):
then you're good. And if you're good, then I want
to serve you. I want to give you my life.
Because a good God wants nothingmore than sycophantic worship
mongers constantly telling it how great it is and begging to
do what it wants them to do. It was a pretty simple prayer,
but it was a heartfelt prayer and I meant every word.
And it was night time and I looked up at the stars and I
(48:15):
just remember thinking, I've always known that God is real.
I've always known that he existed.
I've just been suppressing the truth.
Those that have seen Daniel's social media posts on atheism
will already know that a constant theme of his is the
bogus claim that there are no real atheists, that they all
know that God exists and that they just want to sin and
(48:38):
suppress their knowledge of God.Now we know why he says that He
is projecting his own bad reasoning onto others.
He can't possibly imagine that others will have a different
thought process to him or have different conclusions to him.
He judges everyone who disagreeswith him through the lens of his
own inadequacy. He was clearly a Dick while
(49:00):
claiming to be atheist and he isstill a Dick now.
And then after that, about two weeks after that, maybe a month,
I don't know, I heard the gospelabout what Jesus Christ had done
for us. How?
I'll spare you his tedious gospel revelation.
You don't need to hear it. I didn't care about people.
(49:23):
I was still a total narcissist, had no empathy for anybody, and
now I care about people. I even care about my enemies.
Really. Do you actually mean that?
Because the things that you say on social media do not give that
impression. So if this is nice, Daniel, wow,
Dick Daniel must have been a proper a proper a proper, a
(49:46):
proper bell end, that's what. I mean just Jesus Christ has
changed my life completely inside out.
Not seeing it. Really, really not seeing it.
One can't help but be impressed with it's been a such a thorough
transformation. Mind your heart, the way you
(50:08):
live, the way you think. Oh come on Jada, you can do
better than that. Ask some pointed questions.
You're supposed to be an interviewer, not a worshipper.
How would you encourage someone to take a next step forward, to
perhaps peer more closely at their own underlying
presumptions? You know about what they
(50:29):
believe, why they believe, and how they can ground it and
whether there's something more. Well, it's difficult because
most people, I believe what theybelieve is not based on reasons.
Does that include you, Daniel? Are you most people?
Most people, what they believe is based on what they want to be
(50:49):
true. Are you most people, Daniel?
And then they supplement their desire for what they want to be
true with reasons on top of it. Spoken like he was trained by an
apologist. And of course, people don't tell
you that this is what they're doing, but it is what most
people are doing. What a fantastic example of
(51:09):
projection. Do you really care about what's
true? Yes, that's why I do this.
Do you care about what's true nomatter what?
Still yes. Because if you seek for the
truth, I believe that you'll find the truth.
That's what Jesus said. And the truth set me free, free
from Christianity. Oh look, Rhyme.
(51:31):
And I follow Jesus, and he said,seek and ye shall find, and
don't give up. Really, Daniel, don't give up?
Exactly how long should we wait for God to fail to live up to
his promises? Really.
How long before it's reasonable to give up?
(51:52):
I sought the truth and it took me years to figure out that
Christianity was true. And for even more people, it
takes them years to figure out that Christianity is not only
not true, but actively harmful. But the most important thing
that we can do in this life is figure out why we're here.
(52:12):
It's a great big cosmic accident.
Deal with it now, move on and have fun.
Why are you here? That is the most important
question that we can ask and there is an answer to it.
And if you're not diligently pursuing that answer?
Who gets to define who's doing the right kind of diligent work?
(52:33):
Hey, Daniel, who is it you're going to pull a Dale Glover and
insist that you're the one who gets to decide whether or not
somebody's being a true seeker? So do you care about what's
true? Yes.
And if you do seek it? We did.
Look into the evidence for God. Hello.
(52:53):
We did. That's why we're where we are.
And that's why I'm so patient with atheists, because you just
never know what is going to affect somebody.
Oh boy, Daniel, your Twitter feed does not reflect what you
just said. What a numbscot.
You know, to any Christian out there that feels discouraged
(53:15):
because they talk to people and it seems like the people just
don't listen, don't give. Up to any Christian who has the
unfortunate instance of having to listen to this, well
congratulations on getting this far.
But before you even try to convince me of anything, first
try to understand where I am. Because if you fail to
(53:36):
understand where I am, I will not listen to you trying to tell
me where you are. You are someone who actually
engages obviously with atheist all the time you mentioned at
the very beginning, especially in your Twitter spaces.
Point of note, Daniel does not engage on his Twitter.
Maybe on his Twitter Spaces, butI doubt very much he talks at
(53:57):
atheists. He tells atheists what they
think based on his shitty experience.
But he is to not accurately represent what the
run-of-the-mill atheist believes.
He does not actually represent what the atheists interact with
him actually hold to or believe.And Daniel is not a good faith
communicator. Everything that he says about
(54:18):
other people is utter, utter bullshit.
It's projection of his own shitty personality and shitty
place. Daniel is not a good faith
actor, so whatever he says next to this question, disregard it.
Is there any other advice that you can give us as Christians as
to how to engage? I would just say that unbelief
(54:43):
is a matter of the heart, it's not a matter of the mind.
So even though I care deeply about all the reasons that I
have for why I'm a Christian, and I do share those reasons
quite often with atheists, my ultimate goal is to get to know
these atheists and to become friends with them.
(55:05):
I am absolutely not motivated tohave any level of friendship
with Daniel. Because that is really where we
need to be as Christians. It's not going to be an
argument, it's going to be a friendship that changes
someone's mind. There is very definitely some
truth to this. In all my time as a Christian,
the most effective way I saw of people coming into youth groups
(55:28):
or even as adults coming to church and eventually becoming
Christians was through friendship.
I don't think I ever saw somebody convert through an
argument or through evidence, but I did see a lot of people
convert through patient friendship.
They had friends who were Christians.
They came along because of thosefriends and they eventually
converted because of that. Peer pressure, so to speak, or
(55:52):
friendship pressure if you prefer to use that as an
expression. Friendship evangelism is a
thing, and it works. People will convert to
Christianity for their friends to maintain a friendship, and
sometimes even yes, for romanticsatisfaction.
There is such a thing as a titties conversion as well as
(56:13):
friendship conversion. Evidence arguments, like Daniel
just said tend to not work, which makes you wonder why
Daniel does what he does on thatTwitter place because it is not
friendship making that he does there.
It's going to be you caring about that person even though
they disagree with you. We can disagree about something
(56:34):
and still care about that person.
Thousands of broken marriages asa result of one partner de
converting. I would disagree with that.
The most important thing is to be patient and to pursue
friendships with people that youdon't agree with.
Hey Christian, if you want to befriends with me, by all means,
let's be friends. But if you try to evangelize me,
(56:57):
I will counter evangelize you. Let's have a fight over it.
Hopefully I can be a good witness.
Bad news, Daniel, you're not. There's no doubt in my mind,
Daniel, that your life is makinga difference.
Yeah, but not in the direction you think.
Jenna. Daniel, you are actively turning
people away from Christianity. Well done.
(57:21):
So you are a beautiful ambassador for Christ.
Really. Are you absolutely sure about
that? So thank you so much for for
coming on. I just so appreciate you.
Well, it was an absolute pleasure and honour to be here
and get to share my testimony and I hope that it can benefit
(57:44):
someone out there. Well, it certainly benefited me,
Daniel, but in ways that you would rather not realize.
Because I know what it's like tonot believe.
And it's awful. It's terrible.
You have no hope. Death is looming over you.
Wow, you are totally not explaining, not describing, not
(58:06):
comprehending anything that I ormy fellow atheists experience.
I pity you. Thanks for having me, Jenna.
Thanks for tuning into the Egg Sceptic podcast to hear Daniel's
story. Thoughts for those who have made
it this far. This podcast did not shift my
(58:27):
lingering doubts over Daniel being a genuine believer.
That residual 10% hesitancy still exists for someone who
claims in his ex bio to be a lifelong atheist who converted.
Daniel's story does not match that claim, and his
justifications are essentially wishful thinking.
Daniel's insistence on projecting his faults onto
(58:49):
atheists is tedious, and that hethinks he is engaging with
atheists thoughtfully is damn right laughable in his
fortuitousness. And this is genuinely the most
intense self delusion I have ever seen, which is why there is
still some part of me that thinks Daniel is really a troll.
(59:09):
I'd be interested to know what you think.
So until next time, be reasoned.You have been listening to a
podcast from Reason Press. Do you have any thoughts on what
you've just heard? Do you have a topic that you
(59:30):
would like us to cover? Please send all feedback to
reasonpress@gmail.com. You might even appear on an
episode. Our theme music was written for
us by Holly. To hear more of her music, see
the links in our show notes.
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