yeah so we are live i'm here with kevin kevin how are you doing good yourself thank you for having me on the show david thank you for being a gracious guest and agreeing to come on even though you don't know me and uh i don't know you you might be regretting those horses if you want to say you're uh you're uh you're a radio guy right oh god no i'm i wish i could have had some kind of career in radio uh i seem to have a i don't have a face of television obviously but i think radio and podcasting is one of those great mediums that we have in our time because it's about the closest thing we have to immortality when you think about it uh you know if you if you think of think of for example your grandfather i mean you know what about your grandpa you've had small talks with him but do you really know how he feels about certain subjects most probably don't but when you put your opinions out there in podcast form in the cyber universe it's kind of out there forever who knows you know a couple hundred years from now somebody said hey i wonder what great great great uncle kevin thought about donald trump or about atheism or catholics or something like that it's there so it's the closest thing to immortality we have at this point pretty cool so maybe talk a little bit about your background i know uh you're currently near vancouver and bc i'm in montreal quebec and before going live you mentioned you got some roots out here so just talk a little bit about the geographical roots but more importantly the spiritual roots or philosophical roots worldview roots and how you got from being a cute little innocent baby to a big mean nasty atheist wow that's a story in itself um i am originally from quebec city i'm one of those crazy french canadians myself as well yeah um going our dicks yeah that's right oh god man i actually kind of stopped watching rockets from the solar northeast and for your hockey fans out there if you think like in vancouver if you think you have a rivalry no no no think of quebec no deeks versus the montreal canadiens now that was a rivalry i'm team nordiks all the way 100 not ironically i love the nordiques my father till his damn breath could not root for montreal i'm i personally didn't care that much but him he was a heart in the wall actually fan um yeah i was born in quebec city and uh i grew up a part in montreal and also toronto and then i ended up moving to bc now if you want to know how i became because i was raised catholic as well uh my mother actually thought i would become a pr boy was she wrong and if you want to know how i went from becoming a good catholic school boy to becoming an evil evil atheist well that's a long story in itself um how much trouble do we have for this just start with puberty that's usually where it all starts girls like i said um i used to be a good catholic school boy i i i read the bible as a kid my my brother had a small illustrated bible for children which was a lovely lovely little book it was a book you know where you had basically one or two pages per story and a really nice um almost like renaissance art drawing you know like samsung the judge and you know the noah's ark and all that stuff and i used to love that book and i devoured the little bible really quickly and and then i started reading the book itself uh in more comprehensive ways um and my mother would drag us to church and she's a good catholic woman so she feels guilty about everything obviously and i would hate i would hate going to sunday school but i i i recall how innocent i was as a catholic uh boy um i used to have these things in my mind i used to pray to god a lot about thinking like my prayers would come up somehow like bonus points right and i would think i would think like well if i pray for people in hell maybe i'll give them bonus points that they can climb to purgatory and then if i pray for people in purgatory then maybe they'll get a pass to go to heaven that's that's the kind of innocent child i was you know that's uh you're you weren't too uh in touch with the teachings of the church at that early age i guess because once you're in hell there's no hope of purgatory and once you're in purgatory there's no danger of hell you're going to heaven whether you like it or not i absolutely agree but at the same time i although i knew these teachings it didn't really match up with the idea of all loving god right had to be able to change his mind once in a while right and i said come on we can kind of negotiate with god come on god i mean this guy okay he killed somebody but he really really feels so do we need to spend eternity in there come on he's learning a lesson by now do you have any siblings and are they catholic atheist or something else um like a lot of catholics i think uh catholicism was not really worn on your sleeve it was one of those things that usually it's cultural more more than anything else i think i think my siblings are still halfway between atheists i'm the one that's a staunch atheist they don't really bother much about it they might go to church for a wedding or baptism or something like that and that's about it and uh kind of reminds me ever heard the joke about these uh the rabbi and the and the imam that goes to the catholic priest and they say uh father we have a problem with squirrels in our town but we've noticed that there's no squirrel problem around your catholic church this is what's what's your secret and the catholic priest tells the most that's just quite simple i actually baptize them and then they only come for easter and christmas [Laughter] oh [ __ ] that is good that is good yeah so true sad but true bad but true yeah so i guess if you want to know my deconversion story um i guess it started around my teen years uh by the time i lived in milton ontario and i went to catholic school bishop paul francis reading high school to be quite specific and i we used to go to this church and one of these days i was sitting there in this ugly sweater that i hated to wear that mom forced me to wear all the time and and it's hot in there and people are you know there's this this simple ritual that we always have catholic church you know you stand you see it you kneel you know there's a ham you stand by and all of a sudden i i get this thing in the back of my head and i'm 13 i'm like uh i don't want to be here but i kind of realized all of a sudden this like it sounded so the hymns i always remember the hymns they were saying it sounded so dispassionate so robotic so there was no love in there whatsoever and i'm looking around and i'm seeing these people you know facing their book and it was like i said it sounded so robotic and i thought to myself oh my god nobody believes this stuff here and i had this really deep impression that you guys are here just because you know you're here because you're you're expected to be here i don't see the passion that you should be expecting you know preach preach right i mean if you believe in god you think you're watching jesus you're singing is his praise god damn it dude with her do with passion and that was like the beginning of my uh my uh apostasy and a few years went by and i started looking deeper and deeper into the book into into trying to find some answers to my questions and i wasn't really finding anything and i was finding some controversy in the bible that i thought weren't jiving you know like the part in in matthew and luke in the new testament you know where jesus is born for example and and then uh the massacre of the innocent you know remember the massacre of the innocent and but you know in matthew it says jesus fled to egypt but then when you read luke it said that jesus went back to nazareth well that's a 180 degree turn wait a minute there was some something wasn't right here so time went on and putting this to the side there i'm still you know being a good person you know like it was taught to be a good person uh and um around my 18th birthday i was doing a lot of martial arts back then i was trying to meditate under a tree i wasn't very good at it but then i had this all of a sudden as i'm closing my eyes in my meditative almost slumber state also now i'm visualizing this old dusty bible and the vision that i had i don't want to call it a vision but the image that i had in my mind was and all of a sudden that book shattered like glass all of it and then when my my eyes pop right open i said i don't believe this and i realized i don't believe in jesus i don't believe in the abrahamic god but still there was something inside me that compelled me to you know i try to explain as to the questions that we have in life so what god became at that point the deistic god you know there was a force of nature it had to be something right it had to be actually something so i was kind of negotiating with with a force you know there had to be a force for good even though i don't understand i'm not quite agreeing with the whole jesus story anymore but i was still you know a bit of a ds slash believer move forward many many years and my mother always said i was the kind of person i wanted to save the world and she was kind of true on that unreal and i used to be part of a little group called cinema politica what we used to do is we used to show documentaries to the public for free and uh to discuss subjects of political nature you know whether the price of oil and stuff that was happening in in everyday life and i would bring on a guest speaker to say was is this documentary true you know are we are we really seeing this an expert on the subject and while i was doing that i stumbled upon a movie uh called the corporation by joel bakken which is a professor here at ubc it's a great canadian documentary that came out 2004. if you haven't seen that movie i highly highly highly recommend it and uh the corporation is essentially a movie about um corporate entities under the law are recognized as a legal person so joe biken says well if it's recognized as a legal person that has legal rights under the law then let's psychoanalyze what kind of person this is and his conclusion essentially is uh corporations are a psychopath so yes the world is run by psychopath and there is a a couple interviews in there that he's interviewing celebrities and one of the interviewers actually um filmmaker controversial filmmaker michael moore and michael moore at the at the very end says um you know the thing was some of these companies get away with murder that stuff because they know full well that you're watching this movie right now and you're kind of outraged but you're gonna sit there and not do anything about it and that hit me like a ton of bread and i thought jesus christ i am somebody and i can do stuff about this so then i started doing some more research on how to get more active and how to you know create a bit more hell trying to bring more awareness and i stumble by doing some research i stumbled upon one of the uh the realizations is why some of these companies react the way they are especially when it comes to environmental issues is because of the christian dogma they were brought with you know especially that line in genesis that basically says god gave men dominion over the earth and it's true we treat the earth like we own it and i didn't agree with that philosophy i always thought that as a speaker i mean we are essentially if you look at science we are a specialized primate you know the same way that cheetah is a specialized cat specializing speed we specialize in thinking um i think personally we were meant to be the generous of this planet not the masters of it but anyway so when i was doing more and more of this research i stumbled upon a writer from vanity fair the late great christopher hitchens and i stumbled upon a couple of his videos and i just completely fell it's like oh my god that man was so powerful in his argument well thought of well-read well articulated fearless and that just got me into this rabbit hole of atheism and that's how i discovered dawkins seth andrews and all that stuff and all that stuff fast forward a bit more then i started finding some atheist groups which i didn't even know existed i started you know hanging with more atheists and finding a lot of commonality with these people and then i started listening to acs podcasts when podcasts started coming in and i looked at some of these podcasts and i thought you know i could probably do better than this turns out i can't but the point is we tried and that's pretty much where we are at this point we've been on we've been doing this show called left of the valley since 2014 actually and it's gone through several reinvention of itself around now it's called leftover valley 2.0 and it brought me right here today to you yeah well it's exciting i mean it's quite a journey and the journey isn't over yet that's that's the part that i'm excited about right journey's not over yet your mom is at home praying for you absolutely they are they they still think that this is just a phase of course you know and um but you know we're a bit of strange but at the same time you know she's she well she wanted to set me up with one of her priests to have a debate to say okay oh i'd love to interview your mom please hook her up with my information but i heard i i saw just briefly before coming on with you i just wanted to see a little bit about who you are and i saw maybe you lost a co-host or something you want to talk about him oh oh god well i've lost several co-hosts i mean the thing when you start a podcast is people have different lives no but did someone pass away yeah a couple years ago i uh two of my goals actually passed away um the one that usually people think about was nancy weiss gallagher she was this small 83 year old jewish woman you would have loved her she wasn't her and she was you know uh we became very very good friends and she passed away of lung cancer during the beginning of kovid although she never smoked it in her life but she got lung cancer nonetheless and uh and she passed away that's when the show stopped being left to the valley and became left at value 2.0 we took a one-year hiatus from that point because of kovind and all that stuff i was i wasn't sure if i could redo the show without nancy she had been there pretty much since the beginning and some of the best moments we had on the show some of the funniest moments we had on the show was just absolutely with her she had this wonderful way of telling stories and for some reason this like i said this 82 83 year old little jewish woman had been had such a full life i mean she was she was telling her stories all the time like she she would do this segment called this day in history let's say okay like august 3rd such thing happened and she would have an anecdote where she was involved so i started calling her you know what and i started going on the remember the the legend of uh the immortal jew i know for a few listeners that might not know this legend this legend that there's apparently uh there's a legend that says one of the jews mocked jesus when he was walking to calvary on the cross and jesus said you will not pass away until i come back so there's this legend that there's an immortal jew walking the earth today you know unable to die because jesus hasn't come back yet and i used to call nancy the immortal jew of legend because she just had this these stories for everything she was there when jfk was shot she was there you know the whole bunch of things happened you know and and she seemed like an anecdote of her personal anecdote you know she bumped into burke red holes all of a sudden you know so we used to have so much fun with her and yeah like i said she passed away a couple years ago of lung cancer and she's greatly missed there was another co-host that kevin swaski also uh passed away uh two years ago he passed away of a drug overdose unfortunately um young man about my age so so uh quite a shame and of course cohost come and go because people's life changed you have to expect that right so you're the main guy you you've always been the main guy because you founded it yeah pretty much you know i i started with an old girlfriend back then before the show was first called left at the valley with kevin and karen and uh karen and i ended up playing up at some point and we just became left at the valley but she went on did her her things and i continued with the show till this day so i'm essentially the founder and i'm the one constant in the show the show evolves and changes with time and so are you meeting lots of ladies or going through the women is there a line up let me just put it this way is there a lineup of 83 year old jewish women banging at your door no no no but it's it's kind of funny because just to tell you a story how close nancy and i were at this point um we also had a couple other co-hosts which was kirsten and christina um lovely little ladies as well and it was kind of fun because nancy was in her 80s i was in my 40s and christina and kirsten are in their uh their 20s so you had like three different generations there so yeah this this kind of mix of point of view on the show which was nice chemistry but at this one time after the show we decided to go to ihop all of us and have breakfast and we're just shooting around and we're laughing and this elderly couple sitting beside us gets up this woman gets up and she puts her her hand on nancy's shoulder and she says to her you have a beautiful family and of course me being the uh the corn dog that i am i looked at her yeah mom you better start treating us right but what marked me that day is none of us stopped her none of us none of us corrected this woman saying no no we're not family we're just like co-workers and stuff like that or our co-hosts we accepted the fact that we were family yes and you know that was a very beautiful moment i'll run with that for forever nice you have a funny picture on your website i shared the link in the description but uh one of my heroes in the atheist community one of my favorite humans are in raw oh yes aaron oh you got the picture of him you got me yeah yeah yeah yes how did that happen what's going on there uh aaron actually uh he was he came to vancouver one of these days and uh i happened to call him at his hotel and at the time we were broadcasting on civil 101.7 fm was a small radio uh university radio campus and i said hey you want to come do an interview with us we had spoken before we kind of knew each other a bit and i said i've gotta get some beer for you because he really likes dark stout beer so he says sure come and pick me up in my hotel so i wouldn't pick him up in his hotel him and his uh uh his wife and we drove and we did the uh the interview at the the radio station and then he had a convention he had to go to after that he left but rnr is one of those very special guys because although he's not an academic uh from his background he's studied enough on his own that he can converse with them very easily and you can mistake him for an academic arn also had some wonderful stories and a quick story of arn as you see on he's this big he looks like a big badass biker right he's telling me that probably one time he's he's walking he's hitchhiking through texas because he's from texas and he's walking through this wooded area this large wooded area and now he's got this big wool sweater and the sun's starting to go down and he's being tracked by the coyotes and aaron says okay so i realize i'm in trouble here so he would like turn around like trying to scare him away and then we get skittish but the coyotes are getting bolder and bolder so oren says okay i'm a big guy but you know i can't take on a pack of coyotes right so so he's trying to wave down cars and cars are swerving around him and bolting so it doesn't understand why so eventually he gets picked up he goes to whatever destination he goes on his way back coming through that same area he gets picked up by a good old texan boy who basically says the term uh you better be careful around here boy people have been reporting seeing bigfoot here lately it's him because he had the big bully sweater he looked like a big biker people he was bigfoot sitting in the woods there trying to find people down with his car oh my god well some wonderful wonderful stories um it's probably one of the greatest things about doing this podcast is that it has singularly changed my life i have met i mean i if i as much as i always thought of myself as a good person even as a catholic i can probably say i'm a better person now as an atheist than when i was as a catholic i'm more informed i'm more knowledgeable i'm more compassionate i am a better version of myself and this podcast has helped me become that person you know i've met intellectual giants i've met people of great great uh compassion you know um i used to be i used to be a bit of a bigot you know when it came to homosexual and you know i was not an enemy but i just didn't understand them now now i'm an ally to these people it's like it's made me a better person altogether and you know if i the the question religious people always ask me say well what if you died and you find out that you were wrong and jesus was there all along well then i have no problem with that because if jesus is the person christians claim he is if he is the god and he's supposed to be a force for good he's going to realize when he tells my life yeah he's an atheist but he's been a good one so you'll be judged according to your lights and uh it's it's maybe not doctrine because you're supposed to be uh judged according to essentially your faith but if if he is the force for good that we claim all catholics and christians claim that he is i i have nothing to worry about uh is it a coincidence that it's called left of the valley not center of the valley or right of the valley is that a political alignment or what's going on uh the the word the reason was called left at the valley is because at the time we were in abbotsford and if abbotsford is probably the bible capital of of canada because there's more churches in atmosphere per capita than the rest of the country so i kind of felt that you were left in there alone you know there was it was not it felt like you had missed the boat or something so and also we do lean politically or to the left as well so it's like okay i said oh it feels like we're left here by ourselves and we're kind of left a bit leaning so left of the valley so why not so that's that's how the name came what do you think about uh pope francis do you think he's leaning left but well more than his predecessor for sure um i think i think paul frank uh is constrained by a lot of the bureaucracy i think if uh in the vatican i think if pope franc was able to uh be unleashed on his own i think he'd be a major force for good but i think i think it was a lot of you know politics also in the vatican and i think it's it's restraining him so it's a weird it's a weird combination what i'm getting from you because you seem to be anti-psychopathic corporations and top down control but at the same time you like the left and uh you know pope francis i disagree with him when he pushed the job for covid but uh you do you agree with uh the job did you get the job what's your stance on all the government overreach and all that oh well i mean i think government people that say government overreach recovered are like super exaggerating i mean uh we had we when we went through small parts we did the same thing we went through polio we did the same thing i mean yeah i mean remember every uh so sure people certainly still have the scar for the polio i mean there was no government overreach did people claim that all the time no no no this this this is a matter of you know we have a virus we have to deal with yes i am triple x at this point i even caught kovid myself i got the omicron variant it was not something to laugh at um the first 48 hours it hit me like a ton of bricks i was actually uh hacking up a lot of phlegm and blood uh there's a there's a good chance that might have damaged my lungs permanently and i think a lot of people make the mistake of saying well you know you got a one percent chance of dying for covert yeah but you don't have a one percent chance of getting out of it unscathed and i think people don't realize that it's like you know it's only some we have a tendency as a species do a lot of binary thinking black and white yes or no i'm safe i'm not that's not how it happens most of the things in our lives are on the spectrum are you feeling okay though or oh yeah i'm feeling okay but there's still even to this day and i'm a bit of a gym guy sometimes you know i feel my breath is being taxed a bit more than it used to be you know yeah when you hit the 40s that's just that's just natural i'm 52 so i know how the body starts to go yeah it could absolutely be just that too right but at the same time it's like you're hacking blood you're hacking blood that's yeah it's not it's not fun there's something to be worried about you think it's over uh i want to get it from you because you're a lefty and you completely buy into all the propaganda so is it over is kova a loafer i think i think robert's going to become one of those things that like seems to me so far yeah it's going to become one of those you might have an annual covert shot or an annual booster and sure what about monkey pox and all these uh aids that different things that are uh coming up now and i haven't had a chance to look into mockingpox yet so i'm not going to pronounce myself on this point um i don't seem to be going anywhere it doesn't seem to be catching on like the way covet caught on with yeah yeah do you think do you get the sense like in vancouver people are tired of uh just covet and all the measures and all that sort of thing we're all tired of it we're yeah i don't like the masks i don't do people still wear them there oh some some a lot of people still wear them and you know what to to be quite honest the times where we were kind of forced to wear the mask i don't know about you but i noticed that nobody caught the flu that year i didn't catch cold either it's like well that's you know maybe there's something to be said for that right now it's making me think i i still like to wear the mask but you know sometimes if i find myself i'm going to be a bit more sickly i think i might just put it on to try to help not spread it to other people right try to you know try to be nothing like when you go into a hospital that was always the case if you're feeling symptomatic you just put on the mask they would have them here in montreal they'd have the blue masks there before kovid if you're feeling these symptoms or whatever just put on the mask as a courtesy i think it makes sense right absolutely and you know they've been doing this in a lot of asian cultures for a long time now you go to japan you go to china people wearing masks down the street all the time right so maybe this will become the norm up here as well so if you know it's it's a very small change in our society and if it's going to help us as a species as a whole i i welcome it yeah yeah what do you think about i want to talk particularly just very briefly about uh biden and trudeau they both claim to be catholic do you think that they're more catholic than uh some of the more uh dogmatic catholics or do you think they're catholic in name only like that's what i would say catholic and name only because they're pushing abortion and all that sort of truth no probably is uh he's a catholic in name only yeah i think biden is much more serious about his faith okay um that's the impression i get anyway um but i think there's also a different breed of catholicism in the states i mean i think we have the world i mean the states is very highly influenced by evangelicals and let's face it evangelicals have a tendency to demonize catholics and i don't know why they don't seem to realize that you know when you say christianity it's mostly catholics right but the us is very u.s centric right they don't see outside their borders so they think the rest of the world is like them so no world when you're evangelicals of christians and going to spain or you're thinking of christians they're going to even russia or anywhere else they're usually catholics so so and i think i think this um the united states is a very interesting place because it's the one country that probably has a very secular probably the only country actually has a very secular constitution yet they are about two steps away from becoming a full-fledged theocracy aspect our country which does have a preamble to a god american constitution in 1982 but in 1987 the supreme court ruled that canada would rule as a secular nation and not as a a christian one so it's a very interesting dynamic that we have here i think i think we have the normal catholics up here northern the border you know the you know regular joes you know but down south i think you have a catholic that's a bit more radical politicized yeah well that's actually been condemned by the church and it goes by the name the heresy goes by the name americanism that's what it's called within the catholic church it's it's a branch uh sort of a heretical branch of uh catholicism that's been americanized and mixed with politics and it's been formally condemned by the church it's called americanism the same thing happened in france it's called galacanism uh there was a very you know a politicized form of french catholicism that was straying too far and the church condemned it this can happen when when a country is very religious uh and also passionate about uh you know their national identity they often blend the two and it ends up just being a bad mix not to say it's all bad but you know there's good stuff in there and bad stuff in there and it's just it's just not it's not catholicism pure and properly speaking so that's something that can happen i think politics colors a lot of stuff and it doesn't have to politics doesn't have to be bad but uh very often it just it just it devolves into something uh over overly simplistic and the complexity of human communication human relationships human dynamics power dynamics these things are so complex i don't think anyone understands them much less is that individual able to you know um manage it or control it and we have a tendency as individuals to want to control our lives like we make decisions to help ourselves our family our friends and these sorts of things but when it comes to politics it's just such a big mess right especially especially these days i was uh last week i'm talking to valerie to rico we were talking about wokeness and she pointed out there's a there seems to be a return to individualism and uh politically speaking uh in these days and as opposed to a a sense of community which you know is much more beneficial for us because we are a social species let's face it uh but uh like like a famous uh filmmaker once said it says you know canadians have a tendency that we live in a world of we americans have a tendency to live in the world of me and i i think this is becoming part of our culture as well we have a tendency to just think of okay well how is this affecting me me myself and i and how am i affected and we should be looking more as to the benefit of for society as a whole you know what it's like yeah i going back to kobe yeah nobody likes to wear masks nobody likes to get a shot but i understand the benefit of it for society right so say okay fine give me the stupid shot and i'll wear the mask i'll try to do my part right i'll try to sanitize my hands it's a small thing to do you know if it's especially if it helps people that are much more vulnerable than us you know you talk about the very young or the very old and you know i was like what what is it going to change in your life let's let's be a bit more human here let's let's when did would the the the human heart what was it replaced with by the collective wallet all of a sudden you know we need we need to go back to a time where you know we used to dream as a species we used to move as more as a one and you know a time where we we should dream the time we used to dream and now it's more a time where we could seem to make the next quarterly profit more profitable it is it absolutely is i you know when you talk about the uh when you were just talking there with your vision uh it sounds good but i'm pretty sure you support a woman's right to choose to kill a baby in the womb and for that same woman to have her parents euthanized and these sorts of things as a catholic it's just uh it's abhorrent to me this idea of abortion and euthanasia can you just talk briefly about how that how that fits into your your nice vision because it seems like a nice guy vision that you have but the most vulnerable are uh threatened by these things well first of all let's put a few things clear um just because i'm pro-choice doesn't mean i like abortion right i don't push it any more than the next guy right i don't i mean i don't like the idea of it uh but i understand the need for it second of all and when you say for example you say when people say um well you support a woman's right to kill her baby she's not killing a baby right people have this image that you have this seven pound kid and it's being hacked to pieces and sucked out that's not what happens the vast vast majority of times i mean 96 of them it's about the size of a grain of rice and it's it doesn't even have a heartbeat that has an electrical pulse and that's 96 percent i understand there are some late term abortions but they are excessively rare you know and only in grave situations where you know the child is going to die the mother's jedi are both you know i i think there's a lot of misinformation and this we have to thank a lot of uh like jerry falwell you know they would just use the thing baby killers oh they're baby killers and people just glombered after that but that's not the case if you look just at the stats and the facts that's not the case right i mean i was talking to it's kind of funny because i was talking to a catholic uh denomination and mission a couple years ago where they were doing a protest and i was they were talking about post-birth abortions post-birth abortions that's not even a thing that's just that's a made-up cons that's that would be called murder you know that's not even a thing and it's it's but these people are just are just falling for baby killer and they just that's all they see it's like no that's not that's not the case that's not the case at all and i think i think there's a lot a lot of misinformation there and i think that the move that they're making the states right now is just going to come back to bite him in the butt and it's a it's a really really bad move and for people that are believers in god i tell them well what do you guys think about numbers 511 i mean numbers 511 and i'm sure you know your bible is essentially an abortion spell and this is right in the book well it's like divorce divorce it appears in the old testament but jesus clarified that was a concession made to the stiffneck people the jews right so there are lots of concessions that are made and there are lots of lot of nasty things in the old testament and uh sometimes presented as the positive will of god when it's really the permissive will of god that's the distinction that jesus made so that we can't we can't just read the old testament through the eyes of an atheist or we're going to end up in a lot of trouble with bad interpretations this is this is my question then i mean let's go for example that the almighty lord is there and he's a divine intelligence and he's all powerful why do we need to interpret his book well we don't the the there's no passage of scripture that is uh supposed to be interpreted uh willy-nilly by the lay faithful we have a living magisterium so from the catholic perspective jesus christ is god incarnate and christ founded his chur his church and christ and his church are one flesh the church is the bride of christ and the church is the mystical body of christ because the two became one flesh so christ and his church are one it's a mystical thing and christ has uh infallibility in an absolute sense uh because he's god and the church is given as the bride of christ is given a very limited uh infallibility and it's the church is the only uh authoritative interpreter of scripture so i can't just willy-nilly interpret any passage of the scripture i need to bow to the authority of the living magisterium pope francis the bishops and the the living tradition and uh it's uh it's not something where i can just i can i can speculate as long as my speculation doesn't contradict the established teachings of the church but there is a hierarchy of authority that's very important to understand from the outside looking in even though you're raised catholic you might not have had a full the sort of full understanding of the hierarchy and how god is at the top and the god man built the church and the church and christ are one and there's infallibility authority and in defectibility these are the three attributes of the church well dave david i mean if that's the zoo magic wand moment and you're boom you're god now would you not be able in your power to why do we need somebody to interpret the book we don't need that it should be plain given it should be if the bible is a holy book i should be able to tear it apart it should magically go back together i should be able to read it any language without even understanding i should be it should be extremely clear but no there are like thousands of different denominations that don't agree on anything the message is not clear and why is the message not clear if it comes from a divine source it should extremely clear it should be beyond clear i mean if jesus was to walk in right now and say hey kev you know what you're wrong i'm here and i'm going to turn my nachos into breads and loaves and fishes i said hey i was wrong there he is praise the lord you know but that's not the case we're being punished we're being punished for the sins of our first parents adam and eve it is it is you know the confusion that we live in the darkness that we live in our intellects have been darkened and our wills have been weakened this is like one of the most fundamental christian teachings the fall of adam and eve the fall of man and we have death we have suffering we have all these things and uh i don't know if you know but i'm a young earth creationist i don't believe in evolution i don't believe in the millions of years i believe that the whole the whole universe is about 7 000 years old so from from my christian perspective it's like a perfect world was created adam and eve were created out of nothing well adam was greater than the slime and eve from the side of adam and it was perfect no suffering no death and no disease and then the fall happened because of uh eve's weakness and her pride she uh she disobeyed god and then the rest is history we've got war we've got corruption and government we've got corruption in medicine we've got all kinds of uh diseases and natural disasters and it all stems from the fall and the reason that we don't have a perpescuity of the scriptures is because of the fall period oh boy you and i have so much disagreements here i had a way to start but that's okay that's okay um i i guess i'll start with a very easy one is um you ever heard of the human genome project of course francis collins right a catholic catholic uh scientist and um he basically said you know uh there was no such thing as adam and eve there was no single pair of humans the dna shows that aaron rod disagrees with that well that's fine but it's one of your uh sources you know he believes that there's a mitochondrial dna a mitochondrial even all this sort of thing there's a mitochondrial eve as they called her but it's not a single pair of human dna it's not the same thing a mitochondrial is basically one one of our ancestors is basically passed down the mitochondrial dna that we have now yeah there's the whole polygenism versus uh monogenism uh debate within the evolutionist circles and aaron raw told me that the polygenism is completely dead in the water and that no one credibly even believes in that anymore it's monogenism all the way that's what he told me that's when he told me i've interviewed him twice and that's what he told me he might have been lying or joking i don't know but you can go back you can ask him yourself but it's neither here nor there it really is neither here nor there because you know um if if if we're gonna discuss christianity it really would be better to go back one step and talk about the metaphysics of god almighty god the father without without introducing any faith-based beliefs like you know the trinity is faith-based the incarnation is faith-based the eucharist is faithful it's all faith-based stuff but if we go back to god just god that uh uncaused first cause uh that's something that philosophically we cannot deny without falling into contradiction so you know atheism is philosophically untenable because there's there's just no way to support the claim that everything is contingent because you have a circular unless you want to jettison um the principle of causality and natural sciences out the window and these sorts of things but most atheists that i talk with and i've talked with many many esteemed atheists uh graham upp and these types of people uh they don't want to get rid of the natural sciences they don't want to get rid of the principles of the principle of causality or the principle of proportion and causality or the principle of sufficient reason or any of these fundamental axiomatic assumptions of the natural sciences they're not willing to jettison the natural sciences but they want to be atheist but you have to pick one because uh the contingent implies logically implies the necessary that one and only one necessary being and that's what we call god well i'm not sure i would agree with that because you know well i think first of all you're assuming atheism has always been just one skeptical answer to a single question i mean i think if you do it dealing in the into the world view and or into how things began god we can go to a whole bunch of different things there um it's very simple it's very simple everything that we encounter in this world is finite and it's contingent so there are only two possibilities in when we examine the chain of cause and effect assuming that you want to you know admit that there is such a thing as cause and effect i don't know if you're willing to jettison the natural sciences or not but most of the atheists i talk to aren't so if you want to admit that there's cause and effect either it's an infinite chain of cause and effect which is untenable because it's circular or there's not an infinite chain which means that there is one and only one first cause so we should explore this i mean uh we should take five minutes at least to talk about this it's very very very important and it's not complicated it's very very simple yeah or there's a third option one that we don't know about no and that's what happens in science too right everything there's no third option right if you know if you know the laws of thought the principle of non-contradiction the principle of the excluded middle that means there's there's no uh there's no third option for uh for a true dichotomy either a or not a right there's no third option so with with the first cause either there's a first cause or not and either that first cause is natural or not so you very quickly arrive at the conclusion just using natural reason that there is a first cause and it's not natural it's supernatural and that's what we call god so it takes about five minutes to get you from atheism to monotheism and then we can talk about jesus christ in the history of the messiah and christianity is inevitable and then we talk about the authority of the church where did the canon of scripture come from and then bingo bamo you're back in the bosom of the catholic church this would take about 10 minutes if your heart's in the right place and you're willing to look at these things objectively and without bias inevitable i i i kind of got caught on that he said we have we we have pure reason which can lead us to monotheism and then once you look once you're a monotheist there's one god there are only three candidates for for the one true religion you've got judaism christianity and islam and they all talk about jesus they all talk about the messiah so it's very easy to go from monotheism to christianity and then once you're a christian we just have to look at the bible where did it come from who had the authority to declare the canon of scripture because there's no there's no table of contents in the bible right so there is a divine divine authority in the church and so that's what leads you from christianity uh generic christianity to the one true fullest the fullness of christianity which is roman catholicism but for you today the most important step is to get to monotheism that uncaused first cause and there's absolutely no counter-argument to that philosophical proof that god exists there are many many many many proofs but this one uh the contingency argument is just is so simple so clean and all you could all you could say is that everything is contingent and there's an infinite chain of cause and effect behind us in time but that if you believe in the principle of causality you have to reject that because if you accept an infinite chain of causality you're accepting that the effect precedes its own cause which is a violation of the principle of causality and not just any effect is is preceding its own cause but every effect precedes its own cause so it's like a total devastation of the principle of causality let's go with your your thing here and say okay there was there was a first cause so how do you determine that one is a god or not a plurality of gods or something else entirely well if they're let's start with the plurality of god's argument okay so let's say there's a second candidate like i worship the uncaused first cause and you come along and say well there's a second candidate for that could be god also i just compare the two because if the two are identical there's absolutely no difference in the pure perfections that they that they have then they're not two but one they're identical they're one they're not two but one but if there is some difference then one of them the candidate lacks some of the pure perfections that my god has so it's not god it's very very simple this was all hammered out very early on in the in the christian tradition saint augustine talks about this very eloquently and succinctly it's just it's not it's a non-issue and then in terms of like how do we know that the first cause is god it's well it's because how what could bring something from nothing and what what uh what's more perfect the cause or the effect this is the principle of causality once again that's all we need what's more perfect the cause or the effect we always know uh that the cause is more perfect than the effect always that's why evolution is patently absurd it's it's completely silly uh story right it's just a made-up story because you can't you can't give what you don't have so i mean it's a lot it's a lot there's a lot to be read and meditated upon and you're gonna have to think about uh some of these ideas i'm presenting you with i don't know if you encounter these philosophical arguments for the uncaused first cause frequently on your radio show do you talk to a lot of atheists to be to be quite honest i don't do a whole lot of philosophy on my show norm to be i don't i i love philosophy but to me it's more semantics than anything else i mean if there was such a thing as i'm i'm a normal regular guy right i mean you and i don't need to wax eloquently and philosophize about the existence of the sun so we have to do if we have to do that for the existence of jesus or god i that kind of rings like a red flag to me right there yeah well the sun you know it's funny you mention the sun because uh we perceive the sun with our senses right yeah but the funny thing about that is that you cannot justify your belief in your alleged sense perceptions without a metaphysical foundation you just cannot there's no experiment you could design that would validate your sense perceptions right that's why rene descartes went to the trouble of applying radical doubt this is how i went from atheism i don't know if you know this about me but i went from atheism 25 years of atheism to monotheism and then from monotheism to christianity christianity catholicism okay so the way that i went from atheism to monotheism was by using radical doubt doubting all of my faith-based beliefs and that includes the belief that my sense perceptions correspond to reality and that there is some objective material world other people and these sorts of things so following rene descartes radical doubt i was left with one and only one truth that i could not deny that is i am i think therefore i am so the fact that i am confronted me with the the bearer fact of existence existence per se and i knew uh in this abyss of philosophical inquiry i fell into an existential angst because i was confronted suddenly with the infinity of life the eternity of life and i was that life in my own imagination i thought that i was god i thought that i was the only being that's what hurt solipsism is and that's what rene descartes talks about in his disco discourse on first method so it's an it's an experiential existential uh confrontation that i had with life himself and so that's what led me to uh that's what led me to god and it's all connected to the the fact that we cannot validate our sense perceptions using our sense perception because that's circular and everything about atheism is circular reasoning because the effect cannot precede its cause unless you want to admit that the natural sciences uh are not valid but we'll move on to we'll move on to the topics because i know you have to wrap up probably in about five ten minutes is that right that is correct yes so anything that you have that we haven't touched on that you want to touch on uh whether it has to do with your your podcast or with your own life or project future projects you're excited about stuff stuff that you're uh stuff that you're that you have up and coming i don't know i don't know much about your uh your podcast and these sorts of things but just talk about uh the ideas that you're in the process of exploring day to day i don't know if you if you're on an intellectual trip or if it's more of a political trip but just talk about whatever excites you no this that's pretty much it i talk about whatever excites me i mean it's it's uh you know the entire show is humored and like it's uh we know we we poke fun but at the same time we're also respectful i mean a couple weeks ago we had a an atheist podcaster with a christian podcaster two ladies and they're wonderful they're absolutely beautiful and you know we like we like to we like to help people we just we're just trying to get a conversation going well i think that's where i discovered you was on um bread of life do you know rebecca davis from the bread of life because somehow there was a connection to you there is it are you aware of her and her christian podcast she's an evangelical you should definitely talk to her she's very sweet okay and she's very easygoing and she has a lot of atheists following her i don't know why but she has a lot of atheists following her youtube channel it's called bread of life channel if you uh search for that on youtube really sweet uh sweet beautiful lady so i think you would maybe enjoy talking with her because she's she's not um she's not gonna bring up all these philosophical things and all that sort of stuff she's just she's just authentically walking the christian walk you know which is which is really refreshing and so uh she's someone you should probably reach out to yeah i know that sounds great actually i love talking to people like that and i mean i mean deep down inside let's face it i mean you you label yourself as a catholic i label myself as an atheist but in reality we're both humans i mean we we probably agree on like 95 of everything through life you know we have the same goals you you're going to work you're trying to bring bread at home at the table you try to feed your kids we all have these same goals and our differences are very very minute and yet you know we fight along for these differences just because we don't agree on necessarily what happens after we die or if the existence of jesus is real or not like that it's a minor detail in the in the grand scheme of things and down the road you know i i yeah i'm an atheist but i'm also what i am in reality is i'm a humanist right atheism is just one conclusion that i have who knows on the road they might change right but right now i i conclude my my conclusion is one of atheism but i'm also a humanist and you know i talk to people and so i don't because them you know you believe you think that's great the only problem i have with most christians is i don't want them to bring it to christianity into the voting booth but aside that all the power to you all the power one of the images i like to use when talking with atheists is the lack of urgency on the titanic because everyone's so complacent because the propaganda said the titanic cannot cannot sink cannot be sunk and there were a lot of people that died needlessly partly because there weren't enough lifeboats put on the craft to begin with but there was also a sort of uh an active campaign to keep everyone calm so people the drinks kept flowing the music kept playing and these sorts of things and there was a sort of denial that i think was encouraged by some people but other people were trying to instill a sense of urgency like hey we've had an iceberg this is serious we need to do something about it so you i just want to communicate to you that there if you speak to christians or muslims or jews who are passionate about god and the and heaven being real and hell being real if you talk to them just bear in mind that from their perspective like from my perspective hell is real and it's it's horrible and i wouldn't worship worship on my worst enemy and i hope hitler's going to make it to heaven i don't know what his odds are but actually every doctrine he is in heaven because he has asked for forgiveness right well that's that's the question did he did he repent i hope he repented did he repent or was he unrepentant was he stubborn and it's like a big middle finger to god on his way out right i don't know i mean hitler hitler thought that god was on his side so he believed in god well a lot of people use the word god but they really mean the demons satan and the demons that's what people say oh yeah i worship god but it's like it's like i'm pretty sure that hitler wasn't going to uh to a satanic temple and wasn't doing that kind of stuff no no no no most satanist most satanists are under the guise of christianity they're like oh i'm a good christian and this and that but meanwhile they're doing their own will they're not seeking to do god's will that's what satanism is right doing my will not god's will so i don't want to say most christians end up in hell but there's a lot more risk for the christian to go to hell than for the atheists because their atheist is relatively innocent right the atheist isn't holding themselves up to the standard where god almighty is the standard of goodness and truth in their life and they have to strive for virtue and these sorts of things the atheist typically just wants to be a good person and be nice and strive for the natural virtues like be have a family and have be nice to your friends and family these sorts of things work hard and all these sorts of things but the the christian has this uh supernatural virtue of faith it's not it's not a natural thing faith is not natural it's supernatural and it it implies a certain amount of responsibility that we have for our own salvation and for the salvation of those around us so i just wanted to uh remind you that when you are talking with with uh believers i'm sure you're very courteous and nice and you're you're a very nice guy but just bear in mind that they they live in a world where it's very dramatic the difference between the worst case scenario and the best case scenario is very dramatic and that's what their whole life is about and for you the difference between best case scenario and worst case scenario there is no difference because everyone just gets annihilated and they go back to that piece that they had that slumber that peaceful slumber that they experienced before they were born right so there's no difference you could literally do whatever you want to do it doesn't make any difference whatsoever to your eternal outcome you're going to have that peace you're going to enjoy the piece of annihilation right yeah i i i you know as much as i as even as an atheist i kind of i kind of wish the idea of heaven was true yeah it is i like that and i really do intellectually if i'm going to be intellectually honest i have no reason to think that i i mean well the fact you desire i think the fact that you desire it logically that desire corresponds like you're hungry that corresponds to there's food you're thirsty that corresponds to the reality of water you want uh intimacy you want sex and intimacy and that corresponds with the biological parts that you and your female friends have but yeah yeah but i also want superpowers too yeah you're gonna have those you're gonna have those in heaven you're gonna have those yeah the universe has no obligation to make sense to me i have to accept is as it is and you know and i think i think ultimately there's a lot of wishful thinking on either part about my other mind or yours all we can do is so far is just work with what we got and do the best we can be just the best people we can because you know there's one thing that's that we know so far is so far we're alone i mean if jesus is great they're great but that's a bonus right but so far i'm here and you're here and the best we could do is to be at least courteous to each other even if we don't agree philosophy on several things okay david thank you so much for having me on the show really appreciate that but you gotta go and i'll let you go but i appreciate it i hope i'll have you back again sometime in the future okay all good i'm looking forward to it take good care of my brother have a good one god bless you bye