Jun 30, 2018
A psychologist, a philosopher, and an anthropologist walk into a
Podcast. We hope to offend entrenched views, air out echo chambers,
see if we can tackle familiar controversies, and try and find a
third way.
Any time someone has trapped their
thinking in a false dichotomy (Left vs. Right, Us Vs. Them, Good
vs. evil..) then they’re oversimplifying and preventing dialogue by
limiting what could be a rich conversation to the equivalent of
a wrestling
match.
Have you ever heard the story of
Christians being fed to the lions for the entertainment of the
vomitorium loving Romans?
Or
heard about American pilgrims, fleeing to the new world to escape
religious persecution?
These tales have entered our collective
understanding of the world, despite being widely refuted by
historians as a complete fabrication.
I’m contending that most of what
you've been taught about the history of Christianity and Atheism is
wrong.
The idea that Christians were either persecuted Martyrs, or that they held back scientific advancement, burnt libraries, and started crusades is nonsense and I’m hoping to take us beyond this example of binary thinking.
It’s easy to pick apart a creationist with a literal reading of the King James version of the Bible. Atheists claim to be enlightened and rational, in comparison to the gullible believers. I find it fascinating that they’ve fallen into the same self-serving biases and made a revisionist history.
I hear divergent creation myths from both Atheists, Christians and Muslims, and I’d like to share the view from modern historians that neither the dark ages, nor the renaissance actually existed and that the narratives we’ve learned about them are wrong.