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joeltbauer: It may have taken 3 days, but I’m finally fully recovered from hosting an epic Tony Awards After After party @pebblebarnyc. If you can’t be nominated, next best thing to do is throw the party, right? 🤷🏻♂️🤣 Also a wonderful excuse to see many old friends from college just crushing it. A lovely NYC night to remember 🥂 Many thanks to @jamieweilchi , @suntorywhisky, @freshvinewine, @armaninollp, @juleshough and @darrencriss for making it happen!!
From “Born Again Again” - “Episode 29: How Atheism Is Different Than We Thought”
(From 2019)
Joe: Since Thanksgiving is coming up, I kinda wanted to talk about how being an atheist has made me so much more appreciative.
Katie: Ah, that's a good way to wrap this up, Joe.
Joe: As Christians, I think we gave so much credit... we like took credit from people and gave it to God, all the time, when it was actually just people.
So, like, at your dinner table on Thanksgiving, make sure that you make it a point to really thank the people who actually made the food. Like, thank your mom for spending hours, like, preparing and thinking about Thanksgiving and cooking the food.
As opposed to sitting down and being like, "God, thank you for giving us this food." But actually, God didn't do anything.
Your parents worked for the money, you worked for the money, the workers, the farm workers, like, planted the seeds, the whatever people came and harvested it, and there's people who drove it to the store, the people at the store who put it out, you know, like, it's people who gave you that stuff.
Katie: Amen.
Joe: Amen.
Moonset
Joe Bauer, 1971
From “Born Again Again” - “Episode 29: How Atheism Is Different Than We Thought”
Joe: Actually, in an extension of that is how much more mental space I have to be in the moment right now, period. As a Christian, I'm... how crazy is it that I'm constantly thinking about how there's spiritual warfare, like, literally thought there were demons and angels invisibly flying around my head, like, trying to fight over me all the time. You know, so I'm preoccupied with that, I'm preoccupied with my sin and trying to be holy, and I'm preoccupied with eternity, and trying to do good for the kingdom, and...
Katie: So, where does all this information come from, Joe?
Joe: The bible.
Katie: And where did that come from?
Joe: I don't know.
Katie: Who wrote it?
Joe: I don't know.
Katie: When was it written?
Joe: I don't know.
Katie: How many authors wrote for it?
Joe: I don't know.
Katie: What order is it supposed to be in?
Joe: I don't know.
Katie: And how many books are left out of it?
Joe: I don't know.
Katie: Yeah.
Joe. Yeah.
Katie: What's our faith based on?
Joe: I don't know.
Katie: Okay.
Joe: ... what my parents say? Yeah. (laughs)
From “Born Again Again” - “Episode 26: Which Came First: God or the Bible?”
Katie: So, we get everything that we know about God from the bible. And if, and there are...
Joe: Literally, every single thing that we know about God...
Katie: ... and creation.
Joe: ... being saved, about Christianity, about any part of Christianity, all of it is only from the bible.
Katie: Mhm, and then there that thing where you can have an experience of God, but if it doesn't align with the bible, then it's probably like a demon, or like a someone, like, the Anti-Christ.
Joe: Yeah, that's what we thought! Like, if you had some kind of supernatural experience where you thought that maybe you were experiencing God, or that he was trying to talk to you...
Katie: But if it was a little bit too wild...
Joe: If it didn't perfectly line up with the bible, then we were taught, oh, that's the Devil trying to trick you...
Katie: Throw it out.
Joe: ... but if it does line up with the bible, then that is God talking to you.
Katie: And that seems so strange to me now, that we have this one book that we base every experience off of. Like, it can't be deviated.
Joe: Yeah, yeah that is really weird. It seems like all of this, kind of like, similar to a lot of the other topics we cover, it's a matter of zooming out again, and kind of re-evaluating where your beliefs come from, or why you believe what you believe. And in this case, for us it was kind of zooming out and realizing "oh, we never, like, believed in God because of God, we believed in the bible, believed that the bible was perfectly true, and because of that then God is also true." It's all starting with the bible.
Katie: Even how people talk about circular reasoning, you know, when they use the bible to, you know, "well why do you know that God is good?", "well, it says in the bible that he is" and it's almost like it's even deeper than that. Your belief starts with a circular reasoning. Like your whole belief, not even just that you believe God is love and God is kind because of the bible, but you believe God exists because of the bible, and it's kind of confusing. It's sort of like, it messes up your brain when I'm thinking about it now. It's like, so, well, first we need to trust that this bible is telling the truth, that this is the one true God of the whole entire world, and then that affects everything in my life, like, I better really really trust the people who wrote this book and trust the people who studied it for years...
Joe: You would think so.
Katie: ... to make sure it's right and I better, I should probably read this entire thing.
Joe: Right, that was the other part of what I've been thinking about is that, you know, so assuming our logic is right here and that someone can only become a Christian by first believing that the bible is inerrant, believing everything it says... why don't all Christians read their bible, like, feverishly? You know, if this is true, that this one book is the absolute source of knowledge and enlightenment about our eternity and about spirituality, I feel like Christians should know their bible, like, perfectly. It seems kind of simple, almost. As I'm saying it now, I'm thinking, yeah, being a Christian in a certain sense could be really simple because the only thing you ever need to read and know is what the bible says.
From “Born Again Again” - “Episode 32: Q & A: Family, Christmas, Community, and More”
Joe: (reading a listener’s letter) “I can see now that my entire life I accepted an artificial substitute for real friendships. Honestly, I didn’t even have any real friends until I began to exit the church.
Here’s the horrifying truth around my friendships. Somehow, a person saying they were a believer was enough to make someone my friend, and all that goes with it: trustworthy, a prayer partner, a sister or brother in the Lord.
I never even thought about the fact that this total stranger in bible study never had to do the real work of building trust and affinity.
While I was in the movement, for nearly 50 years I couldn’t even see how shallow these friends were. After all, we were sisters and brothers in Christ. We were going to spend eternity together, and we shared our prayer requests and concerns each week.
I was constantly attracting lousy people through this boundaryless, single-topic approach to friendships. But I just couldn’t see it because Jesus was all that mattered, so I just needed other people as obsessed with Christian thinking.“
From “Born Again Again” - “Episode 29: How Atheism Is Different Than We Thought”
Joe: I always felt like, as a Christian, the way for me to care about someone in the best, best possible, most loving way was to tell them about Jesus, and try to get them to convert.
Because then they're gonna be taken care of for eternity. but like, because I thought that that was the best way for me to help them, I wouldn't, like... human rights stuff and like, social activism and all of that seemed like nonsense to me. It seemed pointless.
Like, why do we care about people's rights so much, or like, social issues, because that stuff doesn't even matter at all, compared to their salvation? So, like, let's focus on their salvation, you know.
That's what I always thought, so, like, I was always projecting into the future, looking to somewhere else. Kind of trying to like, fix this invisible, eternal problem, and by doing that I was ignoring all the actual real problems that are right in front of me today, right now.
Born Again Again is a podcast by Katie and Joe Bauer, a married couple learning to live in the real world after leaving their Christian faith. We talk about our personal deconversion story, issues we have with Christianity, and our recovery from religion.
