In this episode, we sit down with a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church to talk about what it was like growing up in the church and how it influenced his views on homosexuality and other controversial topics such as abortion and gay marriage. We also talk about the church's controversial stance on same-sex marriage and what it means to be a Christian in the 21st century. This episode is brought to you by Equal Vision, a podcast produced in partnership with the Human Rights Campaign. Equal Vision is a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting for equal access to abortion and equal pay for abortion services for all women and LGBTQ people. If you or someone you know is struggling with a mental health problem, or you or a loved one is in need of support, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or visit bit.ly/support-the-fightforlifeline.org to get immediate help and support. You can also join the fight for equal pay and equal rights for all LGBTQ people everywhere by becoming a patron patron of the JustGiving linktr.ee/Support-thefightforgood.org. Just pay the $1.00 postage and get 10% off your first month with discount code: "GOODTHOODS" at 0800-458-338300 and we'll send you a free copy of the book "Goodbye Jesus" at checkout! Thank you, Jesus is King and Queen, Hello King & Queen, Goodbye! and Good Luck! and God bless you! XOXO! xoxo, Caitlyn Caitlyn and Sarah - Sarah, Sarah, Rachel, - Caitlyn, Rachel - Sarah, Rachael, . - . . . . . , , & Sarah, Sara, , and Sarah, . , . Sarah - Rachel, Sarah ( ) , & Sarah ( . . , Sarah ( ). , Sara ( ) - , Rachel ( ) . ) , Sarah, Rachel ( ), and Sarah ( ), , etc. ( ) ( ) , . ) - , Sarah ( ( ) & Rachel ( ) , and Rachel ( . ) . . ) - . Rachel ( , ) & Sara ( , , ), & Sarah's ( ) ? ( ) ) .
00:00:36.000I mean, I guess this is the best way to get this started.
00:00:38.000What is it like being a person that grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church?
00:00:43.000For a person on the outside, for me, when I think of that, I think of this crazy, hateful, angry environment filled with really mean people that say horrible things about gay people and all sorts of other folks.
00:01:05.000So, I mean, a lot of the things, the words that you just used to describe the church, that's definitely not how I experienced it growing up, for the most part.
00:01:13.000I mean, my family, outside of when they're not on the picket line, they're, I mean, incredibly kind and gentle and compassionate.
00:01:22.000And I think the biggest misconception about the church is that they're motivated by hatred.
00:01:28.000In their eyes, it's the definition of loving.
00:01:31.000What we thought we were doing was loving our neighbor.
00:01:34.000So the first time that phrase appears in the Bible, it's in the context of when you see your neighbor sinning, you have to rebuke him, not just like watch him wander off on this way to hell.
00:01:46.000We thought we were warning people and giving them the only hopeful message that could save them from eternity and hell.
00:01:53.000Was there ever any dissent amongst the people that were in the church about, like, how the message is being distributed?
00:01:59.000Like, if you're holding up a sign that says, God hates fags, and a gay guy was being buried at a funeral, and you guys were there protesting with those signs.
00:02:08.000Like, was there ever anyone inside the organization that was like, hey, this is not the way to do it.
00:02:15.000These people are suffering and mourning.
00:03:19.000So it's these threatenings, these warnings from God that if you disobey me, I'm going to curse you.
00:03:24.000So we would go to these soldiers' funerals to warn the living, to say that if you don't want to be likewise punished, you have to repent.
00:03:34.000You have to change your ways and obey God.
00:03:37.000Now, people that are also hardcore Christians, that also follow the word of God very closely, but still would see like what you guys were doing at these funerals, holding up these signs, protesting where a soldier who supposedly gave his life for our freedom,
00:04:09.000And from our perspective, we thought that they were substituting their righteousness for the righteousness of God.
00:04:15.000So they were upset that we were out there giving this message that was 100% biblical from our point of view.
00:04:22.000And God calls that compassion when he sends his servants with his message.
00:04:27.000So we thought, even though they call themselves Christians, they're ignoring these vast swaths of the Bible that support what we were saying and how we were saying it.
00:04:38.000So, I mean, there was definitely a lot of pushback from people on all sides, and especially from other Christians.
00:04:45.000But we just thought, they're not really Christian because they're not following this like we understand it.
00:04:49.000So you guys were pretty much solidified in your opinion.
00:04:57.000So, I mean, so that when the soldiers' funerals, when those protesting, it was in June of 2005 that we started protesting soldiers' funerals.
00:05:05.000So my grandfather had been, so it's 2005, so the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, he'd been, you see these things on the news, and he was, I mean, the funerals, like what was going on at the funerals.
00:05:33.000So I went to my first soldiers funeral protest the following month in July of 2005. And before I went, so every time we would go to these things, I was protesting from the time I was five years old.
00:05:45.000So when you go out to these protests, a lot of times there would be media there, people asking questions.
00:05:53.000And I wasn't sure how I would answer it.
00:05:56.000If somebody asked me, why are you at this funeral?
00:06:00.000So when I found out I was going, I thought, I need to understand this.
00:06:07.000So I went to my mother and she brings forth those verses that I just quoted to you and several others.
00:06:12.000We sat down as a family, as we did We're good to go.
00:06:31.000That was my foundation was that the Bible is the infallible word of God and that it's true no matter what any human thinks and that we have a duty to obey it 100% no matter what I think or feel otherwise.
00:06:47.000I have to bring my thoughts and opinions in line with this.
00:06:50.000So even though I had a lot of trepidation at the beginning about going to those funerals, I very quickly acclimated to it, you know, as you do when in an environment like that, where everything depends on you falling into line.
00:07:03.000Now, what was it like when you first did it?
00:07:06.000Like, what was the reaction to other people, you know, other people's reaction to you?
00:07:11.000So that very first one, it was in Omaha, Nebraska, and it was incredibly tense.
00:07:27.000Because people were tempted to, and did, you know, would come after us physically and try to assault us.
00:07:32.000And again, this, it happened with some regularity.
00:07:35.000So from the very earliest days of the protesting, we, you know, my mom and her generation had made this decision to, who I should say, many of them are lawyers.
00:07:45.000So they would, you know, write letters from, you know, as attorneys saying, We're going to be coming.
00:07:50.000We're going to be protesting in your city.
00:09:37.000It's really unusual for protests like that.
00:09:40.000A lot of times we would be exchanging.
00:09:42.000We, of course, would be yelling about Bible verses and the hatred of God, and they would be talking about love and tolerance and how we're wrong and not Christian.
00:09:54.000It wasn't always like this, so pretty quickly, once we became acclimated to To those protests.
00:10:01.000And also, have you heard of the Patriot Guard riders?
00:10:04.000It was a group of motorcyclists who decided to, and they formed across the country, so in every state there was a group of these motorcyclists who, when they found out we were going to be protesting somewhere, they would go and, you know, rev their engines so that our words and songs and such wouldn't be heard by the family.
00:10:22.000And they would, you know, hold American flags and try to block It's putting a buffer between us and the family.
00:10:32.000So when that started to happen, it became almost like a game sometimes.
00:10:42.000But it became like this game of trying to show that we were going to get our message across no matter what any human being wanted, because we knew, we were so sure that this was what God wanted.
00:11:18.000I don't know that he would use that word to describe himself.
00:11:22.000Actually, I was just talking to Sam about this and I was like, when people, the problem with the word is when people, when you say atheist, people think jerk.
00:12:17.000And so one of the first things I did when I got on Twitter was to attack this Jewish man named David Abbott Ball, who ran a blog called Jewlicious.
00:12:24.000He was listed as the second most influential Jew on Twitter on this website.
00:12:45.000He responded initially with sarcasm and hostility, but pretty quickly he sort of changed tactics and started, instead of mocking me, although he still did do that some too, he was asking questions about our picket signs.
00:13:00.000And I started asking him questions about Jewish theology, because I wanted to better know how to counter it from the scriptures.
00:14:01.000And the cops, I told you we called the cops, like the cops were just standing there watching people like actively assaulting us, like hitting us.
00:14:08.000And so we're like walking around trying to, you know, to not be hit because we're not going to hit back.
00:14:14.000Like I said, the church is very against violence.
00:14:17.000Like they're not going to be violent to people.
00:14:21.000So I was actually really glad when David came out because he became like a buffer between me and the rest of the counter-protesters because everybody could tell that he was wearing his Jewish shirt and whatever.
00:14:32.000Anyway, so the conversation continued there and then also had another protest six or seven months later.
00:14:39.000And then It was not long after that second protest, we're talking again, and he was asking about one of our signs that said, death penalty for fags.
00:14:49.000And, you know, of course, I'm reiterating why the church believes that, because in the book of Leviticus, God calls for the death penalty for gays.
00:14:57.000And then in Romans 1, in the New Testament, Uh, it's reiterated says they that commit such things are worthy of death.
00:15:04.000So, um, and so I'm telling David these things and he says, um, it's like, yeah, but didn't Jesus say, let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
00:15:15.000And I said, well, we always said to that, which was, uh, we're not casting stones.
00:15:22.000And he said, yeah, but you're advocating that the government cast stones.
00:15:27.000And I remember, you know, this is all through Twitter.
00:15:30.000So I see this message and I kind of gasped and I was like, I had never connected that Jesus there, of course he was talking about the death penalty, specifically about the death penalty, and we were advocating it.
00:15:42.000And so I wasn't sure how to respond, but David kept going.
00:15:46.000He said, and what about this member of your church who had a child out of wedlock?
00:15:56.000People knew about this and would throw this in our face.
00:15:59.000And we would say, the standard of God isn't sinlessness, it's repentance.
00:16:04.000So she doesn't deserve that punishment because she repented.
00:16:07.000She wasn't having premarital sex anymore and she knows that it's wrong and she changed her mind and she changed her conduct, which is what repentance is.
00:16:15.000And he said, yeah, but she would have been killed if you had instituted the death penalty for that sin.
00:16:22.000And it was the first time again that I connected that if you kill somebody, as soon as they sin, you lose the opportunity to repent and be forgiven.
00:16:32.000And so, again, so I'm just sort of staring at my phone and, you know, in Topeka, Kansas, he's in Jerusalem.
00:16:40.000And I really quickly ended the conversation.
00:16:42.000I don't even remember quite how, but it was just sort of this, like, I didn't know how to handle this because...
00:16:49.000Like I said, the church is full of lawyers.
00:17:47.000You compartmentalize, you kind of sort of push it aside and try not to...
00:17:50.000So the way that I dealt with it was to stop holding the sign because I knew that if somebody asked me about it, I couldn't defend it because I didn't believe it.
00:18:01.000But there was nothing else I could do at that point.
00:18:06.000But the importance of that conversation, this is obviously just one small contradiction, one small inconsistency and a vast, you know, we still, I still believed that everybody outside the church was basically completely wrong and evil and or delusional.
00:18:23.000And that the church was basically right, except this one point.
00:18:27.000Did anybody ever feel that it was bad to use slurs?
00:18:30.000Like to use some sort of insulting term for gay people instead of saying God hates gay people?
00:18:35.000So at the very beginning, they did use the word gays.
00:19:31.000Faggot means a bundle of wood, and they would use that expression to describe a woman, because a bundle of wood is burdensome.
00:19:41.000Like carrying around a bundle of wood is very burdensome.
00:19:45.000So when they would call a woman a faggot, they were saying that she was burdensome.
00:19:50.000So when they would call a man a faggot, they would say that he is burdensome like a woman, like a bundle of wood, like a non-manly man that can't get work done, you know, along those lines.
00:20:03.000And then it became used by people erroneously saying that it was about burning them.
00:20:10.000And that they would burn gay people because they would burn faggots of wood.
00:20:42.000And the real problem is the people that use it wrong are like gay activists and they try to say how horrible that word is because it was used to represent how gay people were burnt.
00:20:51.000But there's never been like a time in history where like there's a whole series of gay people that were like burnt.
00:20:57.000You know, it's just like they drowned witches and things were done like real specifically, but it's never been like a thing.
00:21:26.000An alternative possibility is that the word connected with the practice of fagging in British private schools in which younger boys performed potentially sexual duties for older boys, although the word faggot was never used in this context.
00:21:58.000It really didn't have anything to do with burning people.
00:22:01.000But they'll repeat it to make a big point, like a big dramatic point.
00:22:07.000But it's, you know, it's melodramatic.
00:22:09.000You would think I would know this, given our respective histories, but I literally have never heard this in my life.
00:22:15.000Yeah, it's an important distinction for why people use that term.
00:22:19.000Because it's really just that they're annoying.
00:22:22.000I mean, it's really just, you know, they just think of some non-manly man who can't get things done, and he's probably crying all the time, and he's burdensome.
00:22:32.000My experience of gay people since we left, which is obviously much more maybe reflective of reality, has not been that at all.
00:23:23.000It was about four months between when I first talked to her about leaving.
00:23:26.000So what was the first initial conversation and how did you gather up the courage to even sort of breach the subject?
00:23:34.000It was really terrifying and awful because, I mean, I remember from the time I was very young, there's this passage in Deuteronomy that my mom would quote, and it's about, you know, if somebody, if your friend, somebody close to you, your relative, somebody comes up to you and says, let us go and serve other gods,
00:23:51.000like somebody secretly says to you those things, you have to stone them.
00:23:55.000And you, the one that they came to, you're supposed to be the first one to, and my family's not stoning people.
00:24:01.000What would they do, though, if it said it in the Bible and someone said, hey, we have to serve this golden cow?
00:24:09.000So we also have, in the New Testament, it talks about rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God's the things that are God's.
00:24:15.000So we also have to obey the law of man.
00:24:18.000We have to obey the law, so we're not supposed to be just...
00:24:23.000But the law of man supersedes the law of God?
00:24:26.000We're supposed to be obedient to the laws of men.
00:24:29.000But also, I mean, this is kind of a complicated, a little bit, a theology where it sort of undid a lot of the mosaic code that we didn't actually have to follow those things.
00:24:42.000I think it's the whole, I think it's like the death penalty for fags thing.
00:24:45.000So like, if they still believe that that punishment is applicable, then we should be trying to convince the government, lobbying the government to Like with those signs.
00:24:54.000So that, it was, you know, my sister, if I went to her and said these things to her, she could easily have turned around and told my parents, not as a, it's a culture of tattletales, not out of bad intention,
00:25:09.000but because they believe that They're trying to help you.
00:25:13.000They don't want you to go down a bad path.
00:25:18.000I first thought of leaving on July 4th, and I was with my sister at the time, and when it first occurred to me that I might have to leave the church, or that the church might be wrong, I thought I had to leave that second, because if it even occurred to me that meant I didn't belong there,
00:25:35.000and that God was going to punish me, and that I just felt immediately So much guilt and like I was a betrayer.
00:25:42.000But was all your social life connected still to the church?
00:26:04.000And this went over for the course of several months.
00:26:08.000I don't know, eight months or so, seven or eight months.
00:26:11.000Uh, and then, and it was never, there was never anything, you know, about feelings or, you know, relationships or all that stuff is totally forbidden.
00:26:35.000So, you know, I actually thought I was never going to get married because most of the people in the church, about 80% or so of the people in the church, there's only 80 people or so anyway, were my immediate and extended family.
00:27:46.000Um, and he was, uh, he was just curious and kind and, and that sort of, and he loved people.
00:27:54.000And so he would sort of always be pushing, pushing the conversation back to like, I'm giving it much, like I've told you all those verses about protesting funerals and why we have to go and do this and the importance of it.
00:28:06.000And Why we have to thank God for these tragedies, because God is sovereign and He's in control.
00:28:11.000So I'm talking about, scripturally, like, justifying all these things.
00:28:16.000And he kept pushing it back to, because he's not super well-versed in the Bible.
00:28:23.000So he didn't know how to, he's like, I see that the Bible says these things, but what about the family?
00:28:28.000Like, I just cannot imagine going and doing these things to people.
00:28:31.000And so this is all happening, like, on...
00:28:35.000I'm also still having conversations on Twitter with so many other people.
00:28:39.000Twitter became this empathy machine for me.
00:28:42.000It's not just on a picket line where people are butting heads and arguing and debating and yelling.
00:28:51.000Yes, having these, it can be kind of aggressive conversations, but I'm also seeing photos of their cats and them exchanging, joking with their friends.
00:29:01.000And so I'm seeing a side of people and sort of being immersed in this community in a way that I had never been before.
00:29:08.000And so it was really, I'm trying to say, when you say, why did you leave?
00:29:12.000It was so much sort of happening around this time.
00:29:19.000So, when, by the time this, like, pile up of things, um, you know, and I'm processing it, as I'm going through this, I'm also talking to my sister, uh, and, and she was the only, and other people in the church, but she was the only person, if I ever had a doubt or a question or a,
00:29:37.000like, if I thought we're doing something wrong here, she was the only person who would say, yeah, you're right, that doesn't make sense, that, I should say, my sister is, um, Creative and artistic and had a little bit of a reputation for being kind of rebellious, not as submissive as me and our other sister.
00:30:02.000You know, between the two of us, where she was the only person I could fully articulate my thoughts and feelings to.
00:30:09.000And so when I first thought of leaving and I turned around and I thought, I literally, we were painting at a friend's house, painting the walls, and I turned around to set my paintbrush down.
00:30:20.000I thought I had to go and leave that second.
00:30:22.000And I turned around and saw my sister.
00:30:24.000And I thought I can't leave without talking to her.
00:30:27.000So the next day, she came home from work over the lunch hour and we would always go up to my room and we were talking about all these doubts we were having.
00:30:37.000And I was crying and I put my head in her lap.
00:30:41.000And I couldn't even articulate the idea of leaving.
00:30:58.000And I said, what if we were somewhere else?
00:31:00.000And so that starts this conversation where I cannot let go of all the things that I thought that the church was doing wrong, where our theology was wrong, where we were applying it I mean, in a way that was destructive and unscriptural.
00:31:17.000And she kept pushing the conversation back to, we're never going to see our family again.
00:31:23.000We're going to lose everyone and everything that's ever been important to us.
00:31:29.000All the things that we had learned about outsiders, that they were evil and they could never truly love each other or care about one another.
00:31:37.000They're really just enabling one another on the path to hell.
00:31:42.000And so this back and forth goes on for about four months before we finally actually left.
00:31:48.000And it was as bad or worse as I could have imagined.
00:32:05.000Uh, we were talking to my parents and, you know, and it was another, another issue had come up and I, I couldn't, we couldn't, it was a battle that we weren't going to fight again.
00:32:16.000We kept, I should say in those four months, I kept trying to, to articulate these doubts in a way that the church would accept, like trying to convince them, not being as open, like, but as time went on, I became more and more open about About these questions and doubts.
00:32:34.000I just looked at Grace and I said, we have to go.
00:32:37.000And I should say also, we had already been packing.
00:32:41.000We had started packing our things about a little over a month before that, and we had started taking boxes to our friend's house.
00:32:50.000And with the understanding, he was our high school English teacher that we had kept up with on Twitter.
00:32:58.000And we basically told him, if something changes, if the church changes and these things get better, then we'll take all our stuff back and just pretend like none of this ever happened.
00:33:12.000And he was just understanding and compassionate and really supportive.
00:33:18.000So we had done all this stuff already, but we actually had to go and pack the rest of our things.
00:33:22.000So we walked out of our parents' bedroom and went and started packing, and people started coming, my brother and some of the elders and my aunt, my cousin, people.
00:33:36.000My whole life revolved around the church.
00:33:39.000And so to look these people in the face and say that the us-them mentality, The bonds that are created in environments like that are incredibly strong.
00:34:51.000Yeah, being ostracized by and just sort of expelled into this world that you believe and have always believed is evil and without hope and doomed.
00:35:03.000You got all your stuff packed, people are coming in, they're saying...
00:35:06.000Yeah, I mean, like, they're trying to convince us, but once they understand that we're not being convinced, that, you know, they walked away.
00:35:14.000So, I mean, that night our dad dropped us off at a hotel, and then...
00:35:53.000I had been, in those four months, I had been so terrified of, because knowing what was coming, like, just imagine you're going to lose everyone in your life.
00:36:03.000You're just going to, like, you're not going to, like, how your parents met and fell in love, or, like, your grandparents, and family recipes, and photos, and memories, and what did the house list?
00:36:14.000I'm, like, taking photos and voice recordings and just all the time, like, every, it was just, it's overwhelming.
00:37:36.000And I totally understand that now, which is why, like, you know, if somebody says it, I sometimes will say there are things that aren't cult-like and explain what I think is not, but I'm also, I don't do it every single time.
00:37:50.000So, you get all your stuff, after you ring the doorbell, you're gone, and then how do you, like, enter into the world?
00:37:58.000Did you have a job back then, or did you have a job with the church?
00:38:01.000It was a job with the church, working for the law firm.
00:38:04.000So it's home, job, family, life, just everything all at once.
00:38:10.000And then also, of course, you're going into a world that I had just spent my entire life protesting.
00:38:16.000It's so crazy when I look back now at videos, which I couldn't do for a long time, but there's tons of videos and interviews and documentaries.
00:38:25.000You know, where I'm answering all these questions, and it's crazy to me.
00:38:30.000Were you there when Louis Theroux came out to do the documentary?
00:38:35.000The first time, he was really super nice.
00:38:41.000You know, he came, and we were, like, making egg rolls together and, like, going bowling and jumping on the trampoline, and, yeah, he would come to pickets.
00:38:50.000And it was really funny because like, so he came for three weeks, like, but three weeks, like a month, like, one month he came for a week and the next month came for another week and then came again.
00:38:59.000So the first time, like, I didn't know anything about him or who he was really.
00:39:03.000I mean, I knew he was from the BBC, obviously, and that But I hadn't seen any of his stuff.
00:39:07.000And then before he came the next time, I was supposed to be studying for a test or something.
00:39:13.000I was in college and I was procrastinating.
00:39:16.000So I look on YouTube and find this documentary that he did.
00:39:19.000Do you know the one, the white supremacy, the Nazis, Louis and the Nazis?
00:39:23.000So I watched that entire documentary and I was like, ah, like I know what his angle is.
00:39:29.000Like it's the, oh, these poor kids, they were raised in this and they don't know any better.
00:39:33.000And at the time, I was kind of indignant, because I was like, I'm a thinking person, you know?
00:39:39.000Like, all my life growing up, like, it was never just, like I explained about the soldiers' funerals, like, I never just went along with something.
00:39:49.000I needed to understand that it was scriptural and from the Bible, and so if you could show me that, then...
00:39:53.000But, like, I'm a curious person, so...
00:39:56.000But I just had never obviously questioned, like, the...
00:40:01.000The most foundational premises of our belief system, which is the Bible is the infallible Word of God, and Westboro Baptist Church are the only ones who can understand it correctly.
00:40:11.000I just never really got past that, because if it was in the Bible and it made sense to me, then it was fine.
00:40:18.000Anyway, I was kind of indignant when I saw what Louis was trying to do.
00:41:21.000So I thought immediately, so my degree is in finance, so I went through business school, all these people saying, you know, start saving for retirement, immediately da-da-da.
00:41:29.000So, you know, we believed that the doom of the world was imminent, so I never really did that.
00:44:08.000We didn't worry about it, though, because we thought these passages in the New Testament said you don't have to follow those ceremonial laws.
00:46:43.000Well, so there's this passage in Romans 9. Well, it's not the only reason I should say, but I have real trouble with this.
00:46:50.000And I think it's still hard for me to say, I think this is evil, but I think this is evil.
00:46:56.000There's this passage in Romans 9 that talks about, it gives this analogy of God as potter and humans as clay in his hands.
00:47:05.000And it uses the example of Jacob and Esau, who in the Bible, Jacob and Esau were twins.
00:47:10.000And it says, while they were yet in the womb, before either of them had done good or evil, God loved Jacob and hated Esau.
00:47:18.000And so it paints this picture of God, you know, it says, What if God, willing to show his wrath and make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath made for destruction?
00:47:28.000So it says, God created some people as vessels of mercy, people that he loves, and others as vessels of wrath made for destruction.
00:47:37.000So made for the express purpose of destroying them, of torturing them in hell for eternity.
00:47:43.000So, and then, so he, it's Paul who's writing, He paints this picture, God making you do all of the things that you do and then blessing some and cursing others.
00:47:55.000And he says, well, you're going to ask me then, why does God yet find fault for who has resisted his will?
00:48:18.000It says, Nay, but O man, who art thou that replyest against God?
00:48:22.000Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, why hast thou made me this?
00:48:26.000You just don't get to ask that question.
00:48:27.000And to me, so this is, I've asked, like, for, I spent a long time talking to Christians and, you know, people of, well, mostly Christians, because it's obviously this New Testament, so, and, but also talking to Jewish people about the Old Testament and found so many of the, like,
00:48:43.000interpretations, so many of our beliefs were, They're not fully supported by the Bible and that there are so many different ways of interpreting.
00:48:53.000So many are the more destructive of our beliefs.
00:48:56.000But that one, I have not found any explanation for that passage that makes any kind of sense, that's consistent with the text and not evil.
00:49:06.000And I just, I didn't, I thought I couldn't ask that question for so long when I was at the church, right?
00:49:12.000I thought, I just have to accept this, this is the truth, and nothing that I feel or think matters against it.
00:49:28.000It's also strange when you read the passages in the Bible and they're in thou and thy and you go, wow, like what a weird, like you're reading something in a style of communicating and thinking that we don't even use anymore.
00:50:03.000It sort of highlights how bizarre scripture really is and how bizarre these ideological imperatives, these ideological, like, pathways that are just completely rigid and carved in stone.
00:50:23.000And they didn't even talk like that then when they wrote it.
00:50:26.000Because you're dealing with something that was in ancient Hebrew, and then it was translated to Latin, and it was translated to Greek, and by the time it gets to English, like, boy, what a terrible game of telephone.
00:50:40.000So it's just these are questions that I never thought I could ask or that, again, that it didn't matter because if God, you know, foreordained all of it, then it wasn't relevant.
00:50:49.000But there's also, I mean, like, there is so, and I was talking to Sam Harris about this this morning, he, like, there are so many things in the Bible that I find so much good there also.
00:51:00.000And, like, the language is something that, like, yeah, I know it sounds so weird to people, but, to a lot of people, but, like, the King James, like, I grew up, like, again, my mother was reading this to us every night, and so these words, there's actually a passage that says, I found thy,
00:51:16.000like, talking to God, I found thy words, and I did eat them, and they were unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart, right?
00:51:24.000So it was this thing where I loved it.
00:51:55.000I did this TED talk a few months ago, and it was kind of about this modern political discourse, this tribalism.
00:52:07.000This is becoming these calcified positions and failures of empathy.
00:52:13.000And, like, people think that because, you know, they're so sure that they're right, that their position is the right position, they're willing to talk to the other side in ways that, they're just, it's just, it's terrible.
00:52:28.000It's the way that I did at the church.
00:52:29.000It's the way that, it's, you know, that dismissive, condescending, you know, just hostile, aggressive, angry.
00:53:07.000Well, there's obviously some wisdom from what those people were writing down and trying to translate what that wisdom was.
00:53:16.000And there's some really fascinating passages.
00:53:19.000To me, it's always been most fascinating as a time capsule.
00:53:24.000Like, when I read it, I'm like, well, regardless of who translated this, this is still a thousand-year-old book, at the very least, in terms of, you know, or 2,000 years old.
00:53:39.000You're reading the thoughts and the ideas of how someone was perceiving the world 2,000 years ago, or roughly.
00:53:47.000There's something to it where you're...
00:53:50.000It also solidifies, in my mind, how briefly...
00:53:55.000Human beings have been conscious of their time here on earth 2,000 years ago is Not very long.
00:54:02.000I mean it seems like an incredibly long time for a person only lives to be a hundred But in terms of the the age of the the human race itself, which I think they just Backdated again.
00:54:12.000They found a new discovery where they pushed back the oldest known human being by over a thousand a hundred thousand years yesterday Some new discovery, some new bones.
00:54:49.000Add 100,000 years to the history of modern human fossils.
00:54:52.000These bones are from early anatomically modern humans, our own species, Homo sapiens, with a mixture of modern and primitive traits.
00:55:01.000An international team of anthropologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary scientists report a pair of papers published in Wednesday in the Journal of Nature.
00:55:34.000Anytime there was any conflict or apparent conflict between the Bible and evidence, you know, physical evidence, we just believe the Bible.
00:55:47.000But what you're saying about ancient wisdom, there was this...
00:55:51.000So my husband, he got super into paleo a few years ago, and he read John Durant's book, The Paleo Manifesto, and he made me read one chapter of it, and it was called Moses the Microbiologist.
00:56:05.000And Rob Wolf, I was going to say, Rob Wolf mentioned it on your podcast, whatever that was, a few weeks ago or whatever.
00:56:11.000And it's so fascinating to, like, when you read Leviticus, like, without the context, you know, the time and the time they were living in.
00:56:21.000Like, a lot of it just seemed like, I remember whenever we'd be reading this at home, you know, as a family, like, there was just so much of it that just seemed, like, incredibly tedious and, like, what are we supposed to be getting out of this?
00:56:32.000So I read this chapter, and it was so, like, incredible, talking about, like, Jewish, the rules about washing your hands, which is, like, of course, the simplest and most effective form of Sure.
00:57:02.000And then not eating like cats because cats eat like rodents who also carry.
00:57:06.000Anyway, but it's like, it's super, there's so much detail in there.
00:57:09.000And it was, it's incredibly fascinating.
00:57:11.000So like there's, when you think about like just the history of humanity and how this book has shaped people's lives for so long, it's, it's, it's really, uh, it's really, it's really fascinating.
00:57:23.000Well, it is an amazing piece of historical literature.
00:57:35.000And I always feel strange whenever I read it.
00:57:38.000Whenever I read it, I feel strangely thinking about all the momentum and all the history that has been altered by these words and by the application of these words.
00:57:50.000And your own history, when your own life was essentially guided by the application of the interpretation of these words that were thousands of years old.
00:58:02.000But then, what's even more bizarre to me is that Twitter's what snaps you out of it.
00:58:07.000Is that interacting with people through online, this open forum exchange of ideas, and especially in Twitter where it's this 140 character limit.
00:59:18.000Because when it's criminal, when people are threatening and it's violence and threats of violence, I think that, of course, should be illegal.
00:59:52.000Absolutely, because so many people, we come to bad ideas in so many different ways.
00:59:58.000Sometimes we argue ourselves there, sometimes we're influenced by other people, but the way out of it isn't to pretend or to push it out of the public sphere.
01:00:06.000It's to engage it, to shed light on it, and to publicly argue against it so that other people who might be tempted or starting to go down that path will understand.
01:00:14.000In other words, we need to have people who can articulate and defend good principles and to argue against bad ones so that the good ones will rise to the top.
01:00:31.000And then you just, like, it's God's word, and this is it, and you just have to trust it, and there's baby dinosaurs on the ark, and you just gotta go, okay.
01:00:38.000And because of that, that, that, like, I have a friend who was Mormon, and she was Mormon for a long time, and then she They just sort of like drifted away.
01:00:49.000They decided it was kind of silly and then they read into the church and they started like, how did this get started?
01:00:55.000And they just decided maybe we should spend some time away.
01:01:01.000And one of the things that she said that was really fascinating, she said, I'm really susceptible to like like someone who's a bullshit artist It's like she's like I'm easily influenced like too much So she's like growing up in this fundamental environment this fundamentalist You know where you don't question anything and just go along with the word She goes it leaves me really vulnerable to like being influenced and I was like wow that is fascinating She's like I'm really gullible.
01:01:31.000I'm like wow Yeah, it's like her her structure of how she her questioning muscles were like wobbly and weak and atrophy They just didn't have any pep to them That's exactly the word I use also about the decision making because if somebody else is always making the decisions You never have to like the answer is already there for you.
01:01:48.000You don't have to figure it out for yourself So on both of those fronts like when after my sister and I left it was this sort of like more or less constant You know, processing and asking these questions.
01:02:00.000So for instance, like, back to gay people after we left, right?
01:02:05.000So I got this guy wrote an open letter, like he'd been somebody that I had sparred with on Twitter quite a bit, and threatened to pick it, but never actually did.
01:02:13.000He wrote an open letter after my sister and I published this statement, essentially just this short explanation that, you know, we had left and that we regretted hurting people and that we were trying to find a better way to live, basically, just because we'd been so public at the church.
01:02:56.000Earlier, just the accepting, whatever you find in the Bible, so therefore you have to accept it and just go along with it, no matter what evidence or whatever seems to contradict it or whatever.
01:03:05.000I was going to say, I encountered people for the first time, including...
01:03:10.000I'm actually not sure how he reconciles it.
01:03:12.000I think it has to do with the love of Jesus and grace and just...
01:03:18.000That's the Old Testament and whatever.
01:03:29.000Well, so that's what I was going to say.
01:03:30.000I remember encountering for the first time Christians who were willing to say, yeah, I know the Bible says that, but I think that applied at a different time, or I just don't believe that.
01:03:41.000Well, I know a dude, I know more than one, that has an Old Testament Bible quote tattoo.
01:04:28.000There are a lot of bad ideas, and there's a lot of people that get defined by bad ideas.
01:04:32.000And I think in that way, the Bible is a lot like people, in that...
01:04:37.000You could take a really good person who does something stupid, does something wrong, does something bad, and it doesn't mean they're a bad person.
01:04:43.000You can't say, like, you are this time you ran this red light and hit that car, or you are this time where you, whatever you did that you shouldn't have done, that you may have done impulsively, or for whatever reason.
01:05:43.000This is the way that my sister and I started talking about it after we left.
01:05:46.000It's like everything that looks bad is bad and everything that looks good is also bad.
01:05:51.000If you identify a person as some kind of troublemaker, you can just read into the worst intentions and motives when it's just as likely that it isn't bad.
01:06:22.000And there's a tendency to do that with people that are also terrified of scrutiny coming their way.
01:06:29.000So what they do is they cast it all out on others instead of looking internally, instead of looking at their own actions, and they like to find a fault in a person, and then that is their main focus.
01:07:02.000And all this stuff that we love when someone did something bad, then everybody's watching it.
01:07:08.000We love it because we all know that there's some creepy shit that we've done that if somebody found it and then everybody started talking about it, you'd be horrified.
01:07:16.000So when you see someone getting caught, publicly shamed, and then this giant pile on, it's very attractive to us in some weird way and almost cathartic and almost a relief that it's not us.
01:07:31.000Because when you make it, when the penalty for speaking up and possibly misstepping in these various, and I don't, the whole idea of microaggressions, fundamentally, it's this, and I understand,
01:07:48.000I'm not saying, I think it's really important, I've said this so many times, how we talk to people.
01:07:53.000It matters how you talk to people, but if we're always looking for For offense.
01:08:01.000So the problem is when people say something maybe not quite in exactly the right way, the way that we punish people, when we make the penalty so high, just to go back to John Ronson's book, Justine Sacco,
01:08:17.000you know, tasteless joke on Twitter to her 170 followers or whatever, and then it blows up and her entire life is over.
01:08:38.000And I don't mean to say, like, I'm not saying, like, I'm just saying there has to be more to get biblical grace.
01:08:45.000Like, there's this writer that I love, actually, and she says that the language of public discourse has lost the, how does she put it, Public discourse has lost the language of generosity.
01:09:03.000So when you make the cost of misspeaking or of maybe not saying things in exactly the right way, when you make that cost so high, what it does is it pushes out moderates.
01:09:13.000And what you end up with is people on both two ends of these extremes, and they're the only ones talking.
01:09:18.000And then it just, again, reinforces this calcification and us-them and tribalism, and it's dangerous.
01:09:28.000I also think there's something that's going on where when you see someone do something really stupid like Kathy Griffin holding up ahead of Donald Trump, I think we realize that in our worst day, with our worst thought process, worst circumstances, that could easily be us.
01:09:45.000And the worst, if you grew up in a fucked up way, or you have some imbalance in your personal life, or maybe you have some chemical imbalance, or you're depressed, and then you make a poor judgment call, or you get reinforced by other people around you that are fools as well, the next thing you know you're doing something dumb.
01:10:11.000You can identify those aspects of human behavior in other folks.
01:10:15.000And when they're doing something particularly terrible, there's a certain amount of relief that it's not you.
01:10:20.000And there's a certain amount of fascination of how will this play out.
01:10:23.000How is this person going to recover from this?
01:10:25.000All that stuff is very, very intoxicating to us as these tribal animals that live together and understand how valuable it is to have the love and support of your peers.
01:10:42.000The ostracizing of a person from the group, the alienation of them from the social community, the knowledge that they have that people are talking about.
01:11:17.000And a lot of people are just very, very unhappy with their lives.
01:11:21.000And so when someone else does something screwed up that they can take away some of the focus of their own missteps and focus it on this person and throw rocks.
01:11:30.000And there's also just this sense of, I mean, righteousness.
01:11:56.000I didn't really, of course, know her anything specific except her comedy.
01:12:00.000She seemed kind of just kind of loud and a little, I don't know, she would say things that would always make me cringe, like just very blunt.
01:12:08.000So you listened to her comedy while you were in the church?
01:12:17.000Are looking around the landscape and seeing how the Word of God applies to all these people.
01:12:21.000In order to comment on what's going on, they have to know what's going on.
01:12:25.000So what people are saying and the trends and things.
01:12:31.000When I saw her on Bill Moore, I expected her to be, I don't know, hostile and whatever about the church when she started talking about them.
01:12:41.000But what she said was, at least on the special, the way she put it was, I am them.
01:12:47.000She went out and was talking to members of my family.
01:12:51.000And she said, we have to see them as human.
01:12:54.000And she was kind to them on the picket line.
01:12:57.000She said, I told a duty joke or whatever.
01:12:59.000And the picketer, I guess one of my cousins or something, snickered when she makes this joke.
01:13:06.000We have to see them as human, and then maybe they'll start to see us as human.
01:13:10.000And the way she put it on the Netflix special was, I am them.
01:13:14.000I am the product of my experiences, and so are they.
01:13:17.000And the only way you can change those things is to add to those experiences, to introduce, like David did on Twitter with me and my husband, introduce these ideas in ways that people can actually hear them and be moved by them.
01:13:31.000Yeah, we love to categorize people into these rigid boxes that are unchangeable, and that you are this person, you will always be this person, you are my enemy, and you think this, and you think that, and you're a dirty liberal, and you're a disgusting Republican, and we have these weird ideological boxes that we love to shove people into.
01:13:51.000I mean, if they were little kids and they grew up in that church and they're seven years old, Do we really believe that they would have the wherewithal and the understanding of the full spectrum of human behavior to say that this is wrong, and that we shouldn't be protesting at this gay person's funeral, and we shouldn't be holding up these signs to say God hates fags?
01:15:28.000And it was like we were stationed like at the intersection of these three streets and they were blocked off for the parade.
01:15:34.000So like he finishes his inauguration speech and it's like huge crowd of people like hundreds of that whatever how many thousands of people like flood down this thing and then they're stuck in this in this intersection waiting to go right past us on the sidewalk and so there was like this They're seeing this,
01:15:51.000And it was right after the tsunami, too.
01:15:53.000So my mom was holding the thank God for the tsunamis or whatever.
01:15:57.000And, like, so people are just enraged by the time they actually got to us.
01:16:01.000So, like, we're standing, like, right at the edge of these barricades.
01:16:03.000Like, so on the other side is the parade route.
01:16:06.000And so, like, you know, people were, like, jumping, like, some guy jumped on my back, like, and one another, like, stealing signs and, like...
01:16:13.000Yeah, I was leaning over the barricade so he couldn't steal my signs.
01:16:17.000Sorry, I'm not getting away from the mic.
01:16:19.000And so one of my cousins actually gave his signs to another church member and then was standing on top of a trash can going, come on, you guys, just don't worry about them.
01:17:40.000But did you expect the cops to risk their lives even though you're obviously provoking people?
01:17:45.000I mean, you're obviously putting yourself in a situation where you're saying something incredibly insulting and just devastating to all these people that lost friends or loved ones on 9-11 or in the tsunami or have family members that are gay.
01:18:00.000I mean, did you guys really expect the cops are going to take the beating for you or the cops are going to get involved?
01:18:51.000I had a, we were in Nebraska and my little brother, we were protesting a soldier's funeral and we were like far away from the church.
01:19:00.000But there was a group of people on the other side of the street and they were all holding American flags all the way from, from the road, all the way up this, you know, the long entry to the, to the church.
01:19:11.000And my brother was nine years old at the time and he did what he always did, which was, you know, put down, lay the American flag on the ground and stand on top of it and hold a picket sign.
01:19:21.000And within like a couple of minutes, like nine cops showed up and started talking about arresting my mother for flag mutilation and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
01:19:33.000And so before they do the arrest, you know, again, my mom and my uncle were both there and they are both lawyers.
01:19:40.000And my uncle's like, you know, Johnson versus Texas.
01:19:44.000The Supreme Court said in that case that you can mutilate.
01:19:48.000Not only can you mutilate a flag, you can even burn it.
01:19:53.000And one of the cops was like, we're not in Texas, we're in Nebraska.
01:19:58.000So like, this is obviously a Supreme Court case.
01:20:00.000So it's and he said, Supreme Court has jurisdiction all over the country.
01:20:04.000So in other words, I guess what I'm saying is like the the way that sometimes the they did, sometimes there were really good cops who did their job more super professional and Didn't let their beliefs about our, you know, religious beliefs or what they thought about our message get in the way of them doing their job.
01:20:39.000I mean, I know you're not justifying it, but...
01:20:43.000It's from the point of view of something like me, someone like me, I would say don't bring any cops there.
01:20:50.000No, if you start that kind of shit at a funeral or for a soldier and a bunch of people come by and beat your ass, well then don't do that again.
01:20:58.000Because you're pissing people off and you're hurting their feelings and you're dealing with someone who's already emotionally scarred.
01:21:03.000Those cops need to be out there stopping robberies and, you know, breaking and entering into people's houses and carjackings and that's what they're supposed to be doing.
01:21:13.000They're not supposed to be, like, helping out people who are intentionally provoking and emotionally disturbing people.
01:21:21.000But I mean, so obviously from the church's perspective, it's like this, it's, these are sincerely held religious beliefs and the first amendment, like what good is the first amendment?
01:21:30.000Like this, obviously this, uh, but it's not a first amendment issue.
01:21:34.000Like the, but because the, it's no one in an official position is saying you cannot speak.
01:21:39.000Well, so, compare that to, like, the campus.
01:21:41.000What's going on on these campuses, right?
01:21:43.000So you think that the cops shouldn't be there to protect those people?
01:21:46.000They're provoking people and making them angry?
01:21:48.000Well, it's a different sort of a scenario.
01:21:51.000I think the cops should definitely be there to prevent violence on campus for several reasons.
01:21:57.000One reason, because I think you're dealing with very young, very impressionable people who make very poor choices and feel justified because they're around a bunch of people that also have like-minded ideas, a lot of peer pressure, a lot of diffusion of responsibility that comes from these mass groups of people that are acting,
01:22:16.000and the mob mentality that comes along with that.
01:22:20.000I think it's very Very important to protect them from themselves, and it's a hot button issue.
01:22:26.000I think protesting at a soldier's funeral is just gross.
01:22:52.000First, they won a $10.9 million verdict against us at the trial court, and then it was reversed at the appeals court, and the Supreme Court said 8 to 1. They have...
01:23:00.000It's the constitutional right for them to do this.
01:23:49.000I think, obviously, I don't, I think it's terrible that they do do it.
01:23:52.000And that was actually one of the things, you know, before my sister and I left, that was one of the, I wasn't going to hold a sign that I didn't believe was true.
01:24:00.000And I wasn't going to go to any more funeral protests.
01:24:17.000I know, but do you think that, really, that the cops, that's an intelligent and adequate and fair use of resources to go and protect a bunch of troublemakers?
01:24:30.000It depends on how you feel about the First Amendment.
01:24:33.000It's the principle of the thing rather than the application.
01:24:49.000Right, but it seems like you're organizing this.
01:24:52.000So if you're organizing this sort of antagonistic display where you know you're going to hurt someone's feelings in a very dangerous time, don't you think you should hire your own security?
01:25:02.000Why should the police have to be there to secure you?
01:25:24.000But the police are really there to enforce laws.
01:25:27.000Well, the law is you don't get to punch somebody, right?
01:25:30.000But they're just assuming that something is going to go bad.
01:25:33.000Okay, so for instance, just back to the campus thing for a second.
01:25:36.000You have these people who have announced, we're going to go protest this person, we're not going to let them speak, even though they've been granted permission by the, you know, everybody, like, they're going, they should be able to speak, right?
01:25:46.000But we're not going to let them speak, because we don't like their message.
01:25:48.000So, if the cops know that that's going to happen...
01:26:06.000Well, obviously, this is still back to...
01:26:08.000It's not, if the cops say, well, you can't speak because you're likely to cause a riot or people to, you know, some kind of disturbance.
01:26:18.000Like, they're not allowed to do that based on, like, if it's just, this is religious opinion.
01:26:23.000We weren't saying, we want you to hurt us.
01:26:26.000We're not trying to provoke you to hurt us.
01:26:28.000We're trying to deliver this message that we think is The truth of God, right?
01:26:32.000So it wasn't, there's a difference between like deliberately provoking and inciting violence, like deliberately inciting violence and what we were doing, which was, you know, trying to proclaim this message that we thought was the truth.
01:27:04.000So I see what you're saying, and I think that it gets a little weird when we're talking about people giving speeches on campus and then having other people shut down those speeches.
01:27:14.000Because I think that the people who are protesting have...
01:27:18.000As much right, especially if it's in their school, they have as much right to voice their concern for this message as the person does to distribute that message.
01:27:28.000And if the police come along and say we're going to shut down the distribution of this message, most of the time they do it when things are out of hand.
01:27:34.000So an excellent tool for someone who's trying to silence people is to make sure that things get out of hand.
01:27:39.000Which is why, so that having the cops present, like, and letting both sides have their voices without the ability to resort to violence.
01:27:47.000So this is the whole idea, like, we would, in these letters that would go out to the cops, was that the idea of having a buffer zone, like, yes, we want to proclaim our message.
01:28:04.000I understand that, but I just think that you shouldn't, obviously it's not you anymore, but I just do not think that anybody, especially from an offensive group like that, should be able to allocate resources that are public use, like police.
01:28:15.000We didn't make the decision, obviously.
01:28:18.000We didn't make the decision for them to, like, they decide, like, okay, well, is this likely going to, like, so they can either be proactive and set the buffer zone, or be reactive, like, we're calling the cops because we're getting punched or whatever.
01:28:30.000Because, like, they're going to go out no matter what.
01:28:33.000Even when they would say, we're not going to protect you, we would go.
01:29:04.000And so in that case, we actually didn't go.
01:29:08.000That's kind of a chicken shit response.
01:29:10.000Actually, I was going to say, like, so the thing is, so I was there during this conversation and I heard my mom was explaining that we weren't going to go.
01:29:19.000It actually had more to do with logistics.
01:29:21.000Like, we couldn't get there, like plane tickets and whatever.
01:29:30.000It's so fascinating to talk to you because you're such an intelligent, reasonable person.
01:29:34.000It's almost impossible for me to imagine until I see like the little bit of resistance to the idea of this being a First Amendment issue and the police there.
01:29:46.000Then you kind of go back to the church.
01:31:13.000It's just this whole intensely negative instinctive reactions to those things.
01:31:19.000Obviously I overcame it and I reached out to her a few weeks before we left and she was amazing like within I hadn't talked to her in three and a half years and had said all kinds of terrible things you know about her after she left but But she was wonderful and she said like within like 30 seconds of like when I when she understood that I was you know planning to leave I want you to come live with me and it was it was amazing and so kind and so I lived there for
01:31:50.000My sister was still in school, so we were traveling back to Topeka, sorry, so it was half an hour from my cousin's house, you know, four days a week while she was still in school.
01:32:00.000And so we were constantly running into our family and driving by the pickets because they picket every day in Topeka several times a day.
01:32:06.000And like at the grocery store and on campus.
01:32:09.000And so it was just, we needed to get away.
01:32:12.000So we ended up going to Deadwood, South Dakota.
01:32:15.000My brother had been a fan of the TV show and...
01:32:19.000And it just seemed like a nice quiet place.
01:33:16.000I'm so glad to be living now and not before social media where I can actually see these things and know what they're up to and a little bit about how they're doing.
01:34:35.000A baby that came from her body, loved you and raised you, She can.
01:34:43.000When I think about when I was at the church, and this is one of the hardest things to articulate, the feeling of when somebody leaves, there is no interaction.
01:34:55.000Some people would ask, well, what if you saw her at such a place?
01:35:55.000One of the great things about Twitter, and the internet in general, is that it's a thing where...
01:36:02.000Obviously, my little brothers, for instance, they are hearing all this bad stuff about You know, my sister and me, anybody who leaves, they'll hear bad things about us.
01:36:11.000But the good thing about the internet is that they can go on.
01:36:14.000They can go to my Twitter account and see what I'm actually saying.
01:36:25.000Fear of judgment I guess from my family and I just I just choose to focus on other things and not post things on Twitter but like I still I follow them on this other account that I created that's not blocked right and it's just WBC accounts so like and I see like things that they say and like doctrines that I now believe are unscriptural and so like I will tweet them you know verses like that I what this contradicts you like and try to like basically doing what I was doing for them now against them like just in this right in these instances and and So
01:36:56.000there is some engagement a little bit with my family on Twitter, especially because of anything that I do publicly.
01:37:06.000But when my TED Talk came out, there was a couple of articles and people were tweeting it a lot.
01:37:11.000And, uh, so my uncle and my aunt both were tweeting, tweeting me and tweeting about me.
01:37:18.000And so I was, you know, we're having this repartee, I guess, like just, you know, going back and forth about these, these Bible verses and, and debating.
01:37:26.000And so all of that stuff is, it's, it's, I hope, well, at some point, hopefully we'll have, we'll have some effect.
01:37:44.000The day that I left, one of my cousins, you know, came into my bedroom while I was crying and packing, and I was asking, like, just very calmly, like, this is my best friend.
01:37:52.000She was a year older than me, is a year older than me.
01:38:52.000During this time, I'm talking about it and giving a few interviews, talking about it there, on Twitter a little bit, reiterating the verses that contradict them.
01:39:03.000And then, like, after more than two years, like, I wake up one morning and I check, you know, I'm checking their Twitters.
01:39:09.000And, uh, there was a blog post and they said, uh, about that fags can't repent sign.
01:39:16.000So I, like, opened the blog post and it's, uh, for the first time ever, they had publicly disavowed a sign and using the same Bible verses that I had been.
01:39:24.000And I know this is like a very small point in the grand scheme of things.
01:41:38.000And then the Samaritan stops and binds up his wounds and puts him on his own, puts him on his own beast and takes him to an inn and gives the innkeeper money to take care of him and says, anything that you spend more than this, I'm going to, I'll pay you back when I come again.
01:41:53.000So he's like actually practically taking care of him.
01:41:56.000So Jesus says, and who do you think, which of these was neighbor to the man who fell among thieves?
01:42:06.000So, in other words, what I'm saying is we reduced loving our neighbor to preaching, to picketing, to putting words on signs and going out and publishing them.
01:42:15.000That's what we thought loving our neighbor was.
01:42:17.000But the one time, the example that Jesus gives is not preaching.
01:42:22.000The Samaritan didn't go and say, this happened to you because you're a sinner.
01:42:37.000Like, why didn't we make that an issue for ourselves, like, a primary part of our theology?
01:42:45.000And why didn't we encourage others to do it, too?
01:42:48.000Anyway, so, again, this is something that I didn't realize until after, and I was talking to a couple of Christian friends of mine who pointed that out, and I was like, I cannot believe I missed that, like, all those years.
01:43:00.000And what's crazy is, like, in the story, the priest and the Levite are the people who are, like, dealing with the things of God, right?
01:43:28.000In a lot of cases, people just didn't understand what our theology actually was, how we actually thought, which is why, you know, David, Abbot Ball making this, you know, Jewelicious, like, the fact that this was an ongoing conversation, that he really got into the nuances of our theology and could really understand where I was coming from,
01:43:45.000to be able to make the point in a way that I could understand.
01:43:49.000And that's, I mean, I'm kind of in a position to do that with my family now.
01:43:53.000Anybody, any of us who leaves and who understands You know Ken can try to push back in a way that's a lot more effective than people who just Don't understand where they're where they're coming from.
01:44:02.000So you get this job Yeah, so I got a dead one my sister and I got a dead one and we were only gonna be there for a month and And then we're going to go back and Grace was going to go to school and I was going to get a job.
01:44:15.000And then I was in Deadwood for a couple of weeks and I was like, the idea of going back to Kansas and like being back in the shadow of the church and like seeing our family all the time and like...
01:44:26.000Seeing them and not like it's it's constantly being face to face with rejection from the people that we love the most and like the idea of going back to that environment like I my cousin was wonderful and I I love her dearly like I just couldn't go back there so like the day before we're supposed to leave Deadwood Grace decided to try out for a play there and and agreed to stay with me so we changed like all of her classes to be online and Anyway,
01:44:53.000and we're staying with Jehovah's Witnesses, which we didn't know that when we booked it.
01:45:00.000It's a beautiful old house in the Black Hills.
01:45:04.000So yeah, they thought at first when they realized what was happening, Who we were, we start having these conversations, and then we find out they're Jehovah's Witnesses, and they thought at first that we might be disfellowshipped witnesses before they realized we were at the church.
01:45:17.000Anyways, it was just like these insane conversations about doctrine and theology and interpretation, and it was just so mind-blowing to see that there were other ways of understanding these texts that are consistent with the text, but totally different than we understood.
01:45:31.000Anyway, the husband, Dustin, co-owns a marketing company in Deadwood, so I took a job there part-time.
01:45:39.000So what is your process or what's the journey from leaving the church, going to Deadwood, and then becoming sort of a self-proclaimed atheist?
01:45:50.000How do you completely remove yourself from the shackles of ideology?
01:46:10.000Yeah, so it was like each time we'd be presented with a situation that, so like gay people or Jewish people or these Jehovah's Witnesses, it was, obviously I had the instinctive responses to their ideas.
01:46:26.000But each time I would feel something, I would just ask myself these questions.
01:47:44.000It's really hard for me still to go back and watch some of those videos because it's so...
01:47:50.000It's I know exactly where I was coming from at the time, but it's so like the arrogance and the condescension and the certainty that we were right.
01:47:59.000And now, of course, knowing like all the reasons why I don't believe those things.
01:48:05.000But anyway, it's like the fact that people were understanding in spite of that long history of all those things that I had said and done at the church was overwhelming and wonderful.
01:48:19.000But anyway, my sister and I were basically putting ourselves over and over.
01:48:25.000We hadn't been in Deadwood for very long when I got a message from David.
01:48:30.000It was on my birthday, and I told him that we had left.
01:48:36.000And, you know, I had stopped tweeting.
01:48:39.000He knew something was up because I had stopped tweeting several months earlier.
01:48:42.000And so he invited us to come to the Jewlicious Festival, which was a few weeks later.
01:48:48.000It's like end of February or something, beginning of March.
01:48:51.000I had protested at the Jewish Festival three years earlier, and all these negative associations and feelings about Jewish people, but realizing I don't know anything about Jewish people.
01:49:02.000We've been protesting the synagogue in Topeka all my life, but I don't really know, other than just generally, Jews kill Jesus and reject him as the Savior, so therefore they're without hope.
01:49:15.000But I didn't know really much about Jewish theology.
01:49:18.000I didn't know anything about Jewish people.
01:49:20.000I'd never really spent time with them.
01:49:21.000So I wanted to go to the festival, my sister and I did, because we wanted to meet Jewish people and do this whole, it's this examining process.
01:51:34.000My grandmother, I called her about a month, a little over a month after we left, one of my first nights in Deadwood, and I told her we had left, and she just immediately started crying, and she said, I've been waiting for this for 30 years.
01:51:48.000One of my older brothers had left since my dad had joined the church, is what she was saying.
01:54:54.000And why are they so akin to religious experiences?
01:54:57.000And why do people even believe now, especially these scholars in Jerusalem, have connected the burning bush of Moses With the acacia bush, which is a bush that's rich in psychedelic chemicals, and they think that it's entirely possible that Moses had a psychedelic experience in which he came back with all the laws that human beings are supposed to be living as proclaimed by the great spirit of the universe,
01:55:35.000And this is why, like, the whole process since we left, like, it wasn't a, like, I mean, first of all, like, the idea of choosing another belief system, like, I would, like, learn all this stuff about Jehovah's Witnesses, and I'm like, like, okay, yeah, that's mostly internally consistent.
01:55:49.000Like, I think there's a lot of, I never was, like, tempted to join them or whatever, and I should say, they're actually...
01:56:02.000Do you think that you guys leaving and having these intimate conversations with them in their home might have had something to do with that?
01:56:09.000We're still really good friends with them.
01:56:31.000And they don't, Jehovah's Witnesses don't celebrate birthdays.
01:56:33.000Like, I was talking on the phone, and I didn't even know it was her birthday.
01:56:37.000It's like, I was, we were talking on the phone for, like, over an hour, and I was, like, telling her about all this, all these things that I'd been thinking about, and, like, and then at the end of the conversation, she was like, She's like, well, it's my birthday today, and I'm celebrating it.
01:57:07.000You don't want to just be like, oh my gosh, I'm so glad you're out of this because I think they believe some things that are really kind of nuts.
01:57:15.000I don't know what happened, but just know that I've always loved and cared about them.
01:57:22.000But I was so eager to have these conversations, to understand what had happened with them.
01:57:27.000And it's kind of just following the...
01:57:31.000How much internal inconsistency, like when you were saying earlier about the whole idea about the Bible being the infallible Word of God, and like, oh, that's a neat trick.
01:57:37.000There's no way you can argue around that.
01:57:40.000This is why, like, it's, I think, internal inconsistency, like, in the doctrines themselves.
01:57:45.000Like, that seems to be a really important way to get in, to get through that, like, to argue.
01:57:54.000Yeah, because it's finding the inconsistency in these two beliefs that allows you to maybe question the bigger things, the bigger principles.
01:58:03.000And anyway, I think it's important to ask the questions.
01:58:06.000No matter what you believe, it's important to question and to always be looking and examining for new evidence.
01:58:10.000Because you talk about this a lot, but confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, these things that keep us locked into these belief systems and impervious to change, or not even impervious, but like Like, resistant to it.
01:59:06.000I mean, I think somebody at the church will listen to it for sure.
01:59:09.000I mean, so this is the thing, like when people leave, like everything that we say, any of us who leave, that we say and do publicly, the church pays very close attention to it.
01:59:18.000Like when I was at the church, I did the same thing.
01:59:20.000And partly it's needing to know what they're saying so that you can have a good explanation, so you can counter it effectively.
01:59:39.000Following the rules, pretending like none of this happened, not causing any waves for the church, that doesn't change anything.
01:59:47.000The only thing that helps is talking about it.
01:59:52.000Because here's the other thing, even if I privately, in letters, things that I sent to my parents or other church members, they're probably not going to share those with my siblings.
02:00:02.000And if they do, it's going to be with a whole bunch of You know words against me at the same time so like it's it's but only by talking publicly can you You know that's how they can actually see who you really are and what you really think and what you've really gone through without the filter of Look at what these whores are doing right things like that like it's It's a do you think your kids or your your brothers and sisters are gonna hear this?
02:00:28.000I think some of them definitely might Definitely might Do you have hope that they'll eventually bolt?
02:00:38.000I hope that they can hear the reasoning and see the consequences of what they're doing for other people and that a lot of it, I mean, is unscriptural.
02:00:52.000And so even by their own understanding, there are things that contradict them.
02:02:57.000And so now there's eight elders, and they're the eight pastors, and my dad is one of them.
02:03:02.000So there's been a series of sermons on imprecatory prayer since then, and it seems so confused, because on the one hand, they're still kind of justifying it, but also it just seems like you're trying to reconcile things that aren't reconcilable.
02:03:32.000And so it would list all the soldiers who had died that week.
02:03:36.000And after eight months, my dad gave a sermon about imprecatory prayer.
02:03:42.000At the time, when I first said that, he put out a video news explaining why imprecatory prayer is the thing, and it's supported by the Bible.
02:03:52.000Eight months pass, he gives a sermon about loving your enemies.
02:03:56.000Within a couple weeks, that flyer was changed, and now it doesn't say that we pray for 15,000 more.
02:04:49.000Is there anything that you think that you can do other than continuing to speak and continuing to do what you're doing that's going to reach them?
02:05:00.000So, I mean, I'm almost finished writing a book.
02:05:28.000Each chapter is based on a relationship that sort of brings us...
02:05:31.000It starts with my mother and then my grandfather and...
02:05:33.000Sort of, like, coming into this ideology and then the process of all the, like, the mental machinations of leaving and, like, how my mind changed over time and then what's happened since we left.
02:05:44.000And I hope that by, you know, for my family, I hope that by articulating these things in...
02:05:51.000Obviously, we're sitting here and even if we talk for however many hours, there's only so much that it's not the same as having it written in a way that's hopefully very clear and...
02:06:04.000And just honest to the experience, like, in as much detail and clarity, with as much detail and clarity as possible.
02:07:11.000And so I wrote the first draft of the talk and the curators, you know, came back afterwards and was like, well, it's like, this is...
02:07:18.000How can we avoid the mistakes that you made?
02:07:21.000And so, like, I went back and, like, took examples from David and my husband and the way that people on Twitter engage me that actually helped change things.
02:07:30.000So it's not explicit in that way in the book.
02:07:34.000But I hope that just by talking about this and telling the stories, like...
02:07:39.000When I read accounts of people who have gone through similar situations, it's so helpful to me to realize that my family, yes, their activities are extreme and they manifest themselves in very strange ways to most people,
02:07:56.000but they're very common, very human flaws.
02:07:59.000And if anything, if I talk about this in a way that helps other people see it in their own lives or that will resonate with people who have gone through similar things, I want to do that.
02:08:13.000I want to do as much good with these experiences as I can, just because that's how my parents raised me, honestly.
02:09:05.000But if I was on their side and I was trying to pick holes in your statement, which is what they seem to do, right?
02:09:10.000If they're listening to the things you say, they're listening to the things you say so they can counter them with some sort of a Bible quote or some sort of a more articulate opinion.
02:09:19.000If I was listening, I would say, you were so convinced when you were with us, now you're so convinced, but now you don't even have God.
02:09:34.000This is another one of the paradoxes that I realized before I left.
02:09:38.000So there's this verse, and again, this is one that my mom would quote all the time growing up, and with such urgency, like she needed us to understand this.
02:09:48.000And the verse is, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, and who can know it?
02:11:48.000Right, there's always that, like, if you think there's, like, for instance, like, back to the, like, free will, sorry, the predestination thing, that God designing people to go to hell and then holding them responsible.
02:13:51.000Isn't that so fascinating, though, that you could see someone in an intimate way, you love them, their family, you get to see all the positive aspects of them, and yet you get to see this venom that he spews out to all the world and that also represents you guys and your family and your ideology and you're behind this Powerful leader.
02:14:27.000It's an understanding of psychology, or a lack of.
02:14:30.000The problem with any sort of ideology, rigid ideologies that are backed up by a deity, is that there can be no questioning.
02:14:38.000And as soon as there can be no questioning, you're talking about human language.
02:14:42.000You're talking about something that came obviously from the words of human beings.
02:14:46.000They wrote those words down, they put them somewhere, and now you're reinforcing this ideology.
02:14:51.000Anyone with even a basic understanding of how easily influenced people are and about our alpha male chimpanzee history or lower primate history, we know that we're incredibly susceptible to influence.
02:15:05.000Incredibly susceptible to the whims of the group mindset and that this is imperative for survival.
02:15:10.000These tribal instincts that we have imperative for survival and the reason why we made it to 2017 and that these play against us in the in forms of ideology and these very rigidly reinforced behavior patterns.
02:15:27.000I mean, when the problem becomes atheism versus people who are deists or people who are Christian or Muslim or whatever the fuck it is, it has nothing to do with that, honestly.
02:15:37.000It's just about mind and about humans and about our inherent tendency to give into these predetermined patterns of behavior to give us comfort in these patterns.
02:15:50.000Yeah, there is so much comfort in certainty.
02:18:23.000It's a very strange aspect of what I believe is the adolescent nature of human Social and cultural evolution, which is where we're at right now.
02:18:34.000We've come so far, we think, but really we haven't.
02:18:37.000We haven't really been around that long.
02:18:39.000I mean, they were talking about this modern human being they found 300,000 years ago.
02:19:31.000You get to operate on these predetermined patterns now.
02:19:35.000You don't even have to have your own beliefs.
02:19:38.000You just adopt a conglomeration of beliefs that fit whatever category you fall into, whether you're a left-wing progressive or a right-wing conservative.
02:19:54.000And we're also aware how weird we are.
02:19:56.000I was going to say, that's where I feel so much and why I feel so much hope, right?
02:20:02.000Because the more awareness we have, the better we can go about trying to shore those things up.
02:20:09.000See the pitfalls and then try to find ways around them.
02:20:14.000But it takes people like you that are incredibly courageous that break out of the pattern and just paddle out into the waters of discomfort.
02:20:23.000Because that's what people have a really hard time doing.
02:20:26.000People have a really hard time changing.
02:20:28.000They have a really hard time taking chances.
02:20:30.000They have a really hard time doing new things.
02:20:32.000And you did all of it at once in one big burst.
02:20:45.000But it's, this is one of those things where like, I mean, I was talking to David, after I left, before the Julicious Festival, we were sitting in the home of this rabbi that I had protested earlier.
02:20:59.000And your rabbi is a whore was the sign my sister held.
02:21:02.000And like, oh, like living with this rabbi, right?
02:21:05.000Like, actually, that's what I'm staying with here while I'm here.
02:22:05.000He said, well, they're the ones who taught you to stand up for what you believe in, no matter what it costs you.
02:22:09.000And so I love that idea that there's still so much from home that I have held on to and that still guides me.
02:22:19.000It's just that I obviously had to, it's just the things that I now think are destructive and hurtful and just not true, not consistent with reality.
02:22:44.000I remember there's a New Yorker article that came out at the end of 2015. And so I was doing interviews with the writer Adrian Chin, who's amazing.
02:22:53.000And he's an amazing writer, just generally, not just that article.
02:22:57.000And so we're having these conversations.
02:23:00.000I think we spent three days together in Kansas talking for maybe six hours at a time.
02:23:04.000And then on the phone, three- and four-hour conversations regularly.
02:23:09.000It was so much, trying to really get across all of this, trying to really understand exactly how my mind changed and all the details in the church and whatever.
02:24:03.000And it's familiar and it's a part of my home and my upbringing that I can keep.
02:24:12.000As a person outside of it, looking at it, when someone starts spouting out biblical phrases and terms and using these parables and using these stories and passages in the Bible to justify things,
02:24:28.000And then equating, like, certain aspects of modern thinking and behavior to those things.
02:24:33.000To me, it's almost like I'm looking at mathematics that I don't totally understand.
02:24:39.000You're plugging this equation in to achieve a desired result, and this result is a peace of mind.
02:24:47.000Peace of mind is what you're looking to attain, and you're looking to attain justification for your lifestyle and actions, and you can do so with this quote, Which is essentially like you're plugging in some sort of theoretical physics.
02:25:00.000I mean, it's a weird stretch of what I'm saying.
02:25:03.000What I'm saying is just like the feeling of it.
02:25:05.000The feeling of it is like, oh, I don't like this.
02:25:12.000It's all these little tools in order to operate the mind on a more harmonious frequency for your own personal satisfaction and your feeling of happiness and peace.
02:25:25.000Like you can feel comfort in the fact that you have quoted the Bible verses that explain your behavior correctly.
02:25:31.000You've made the noises in the right order.
02:27:18.000It was attacking every other version of Christianity, every other understanding of the Bible.
02:27:25.000And it's like, by default, it's like, well, you know exactly why all these people are wrong, Methodists and Catholics and whatever.
02:27:33.000And you can articulate chapter and verse why they're all wrong and therefore the end like it becomes clear like we are right and we are the only ones who are right and everybody else is so it's just this it's it's so frustrating yeah so frustrating it's well I hate to use the word but it just it lacks enlightenment Because it's dealing with conflict and it's dealing with finger pointing.
02:28:19.000If there is a God of the Bible, I mean, if there is a God that's in charge of this whole thing and he's filled with love and he has a plan for us all.
02:28:35.000Look, I mean, it's amazing how well you keep it together without contact with your mom and your dad and your brothers and sisters, and it's been four years.
02:29:44.000So like, you know, in the New Testament, Paul talks about, you know, to the Jews I became as a Jew and to the Greeks as a Greek and, you know, to the weak I became as weak.
02:29:53.000It's like the idea is like you understand your audience and who you're talking to and you're actually trying to reach them.
02:30:00.000You're not just self-righteously, you know, proclaiming this thing and saying, get on board or you're doomed.
02:30:06.000Like, it's, there was no, we had, and we sometimes could have those arguments one-on-one, but like, you know, when we go out to these protests, we're saying these things, and it's so provocative and inflammatory, and we knew it.
02:30:19.000And we just did it anyway because we thought it was justified.
02:30:22.000As long as it was true, then it didn't matter how we said it or when we said it or to whom we said it.
02:30:27.000It was a grieving widow or a child whose father had just died or parents whose children had just died.
02:31:25.000That's why I keep, I mean, I want to keep asking the questions.
02:31:28.000It's not just about, you know, I think my family feels, they feel attacked, I'm sure, when I talk about this and why I don't believe it.
02:31:35.000And, you know, when I send these messages on Twitter, and I remember what that felt like, you know, hearing people, people that I had loved.
02:31:43.000Speak against these doctrines and values that I held so dear.
02:31:48.000But it's not because I'm trying to hurt them or embarrass them or humiliate them.
02:31:57.000And if I'm wrong about something, then I want to know that too.
02:32:01.000So it's always this openness to change and to, I don't know, finding a better way.
02:32:08.000One of the things you did that's incredibly brave is not just leave, but when you change your thinking and change, you have to admit that you fucked up.
02:33:29.000Well, I think Your ability to say that you don't agree with what you used to do and you are a different person now is so important for people to hear.
02:33:39.000It's one of the most important things I think you're saying.
02:33:41.000Because people feel so imprisoned by their past.
02:33:45.000It's a huge problem with human beings that we repeat...
02:33:49.000Sort of the same patterns of behavior because even if they're wrong, there's comfort in going back to those cigarettes.
02:33:57.000There's comfort in binge eating again.
02:34:14.000Have real intellectual courage to just actually challenge your own personal thought processes and ideas and look deep into these scriptures that you've been following your whole life and find these contradictions, explore these contradictions and try to debate them,
02:34:29.000but also just to come out and say, like, I was making just big mistakes.
02:34:36.000I think it's really hard to say, I mean, a lot of things, but two things, just for people in general.
02:35:17.000If you're not examining, if you're not taking in new evidence, if you're not saying, I don't know, it's like, I don't have to have all the answers.
02:36:07.000I can keep trying to understand and, you know, so it's...
02:36:11.000That's why one of the most the weakest things you can ever see in a person is a person talking about something in a way where like like you ask them a question about something and they don't really know and They try to pretend they do start to pontificate.
02:36:26.000Yeah, well you see it instead of saying god.
02:36:28.000I don't know is that true instead or instead of being Like open to the possibility of anything being outside of the realm of their understanding, they double down.
02:36:39.000They double down on their ignorance or they avoid it at all costs.
02:36:42.000And you see, literally see like the little, the man in the machinery, the ego, just yanking on the gears frantically.
02:36:51.000It's one of the more fascinating things to me about religion in general is that we have this incredible desire to become a part of a group.
02:37:01.000But we also can see the gears spinning when someone does agree with something or someone does say something that resonates or when someone says something that's contradictory.
02:37:14.000We recognize that this is all some sort of a weird cognitive dance that we're doing to try to make Make sense out of this temporary existence on a planet hurling through infinity.
02:37:32.000It's the human where we find ourselves existing and communicating that clearly is on some sort of path, some sort of weird path of progress and of innovation and of understanding that we're in the middle of.
02:37:49.000We're in the middle of this storm of understanding.
02:37:52.000And it's happening clearly in your own life.
02:37:55.000And you're living it out in front of the whole world.
02:39:22.000And then you realize, like, okay, no, I just need to not, like, because instead of, like, addressing the arguments, like, then you're saying, like, you know, you don't know me.