Dan Barker: Freedom of Thought

[00:00:00]There are no good arguments, and if there were, they'd be out there, right?

[00:00:03]Why if there were, we wouldn't be having debates, right? It would just be out there. It would be something that we could uh examine, and we could agree on. We could all pretty much logically come to the same conclusions, and we don't, and we can't.

[00:00:15]Of course, there's no good reply to the problem of evil. There is none, and because of the problem of evil, some theologians have had to tinker with their definition of God. Something has to give. Some of them give up omnipotence in order for the problem of evil to be acceptable.

[00:00:29]And finally, there's no need for a God.

[00:00:31]I realize there's millions of good people. I hadn't met them yet, actually.

[00:00:35]I hadn't ever met another atheist knowingly. I probably met a lot of them, but I'm not knowingly. That should tell you something right there.

[00:00:42]When you meet an atheist, shouldn't you shouldn't it be obvious?

[00:00:46]I mean, you know, these the Bible says, "A fool has said in his heart, there's no God. They are all corrupt. They have never done a single good thing." Well, it should be pretty clear who the atheists are, but they're just like anyone else, atheists and agnostics. And so, I became in my own mind this brand new baby atheist the summer of '83, and it was um I was all alone. I didn't know anybody else, and I I think that's kind of cool, because it makes it my thoughts. It wasn't like somebody came to me to convince me. It wasn't like some skeptical atheistic evangelist came to my door and convinced me that I needed to join this movement of theirs, or I saw some agnostic evangelist on TV that I jumped on the band, you know, it wasn't that. It was just me and my own thoughts. And I think with many of you in this room, it was like that, right?

[00:01:29]It was your own thoughts, which makes it precious. You own your own freedom of thought, and you're coming to your own conclusions, not cuz you're being told what you must believe, but you're thinking it through on your own.

[00:01:40]It's a bottom-up thing, not a top-down forced kind of thing.