Join host Edouard Tahmizian for a half-hour interview with long-standing biblical scholar Robert M. Price on whether Christian "conditional prophecy" rationalizations succeed in reconciling Matthew's verse stating that his contemporaneous generation would not pass away until "all these things be fulfilled" with the failure of Christ's second coming to materialize back then, whether it's exegetically plausible that the more salacious biblical passages were interpolations absent from the original manuscripts, and whether a historical Paul—if indeed there was one—contradicted the historical Jesus' teachings in holding that Christians need not follow the Mosaic law to a tee and become circumcised. Tune in for a discussion canvassing everything from biblical erotica to how biblical interpolation mirrors the social processes that occur among Appalachian snake-handlers today.

Check out Freethinker Podcast host Edouard Tahmizian's shy-of-an-hour discussion with Richard Carrier about the metaphysical impossibility of libertarian free will. Our actions are aimed at fulfilling our desires; but where did our desires come from? Did we choose our desires, or simply discover that we had them? As Carrier notes, if you reason from premises to a conclusion, the premises and the rules of logic determine/cause your conclusion. Any interruption of that process would destroy rationality, not preserve it, making the supposed connection between reasoning and acting uncaused nonsensical. The concept of an 'uncaused self' originating actions would destroy the only sense of freedom that we can have, a compatibilist/soft determinist sense of our actions being 'free' from interference by causes external to ourselves (where our actions are free in the sense of being internally caused). If you take away a person's memories, deterministic reasoning processes, proclivities, values, knowledge of particular information, and so on, what is left of the person? A person just is a bundle of causes; to remove the causes of a person's actions is just to remove the person. But then, Carrier argues, you are not talking about free will anymore, but rather its absence. Tune in for an enlightening foray into an age-old philosophical issue!

In this nearly two hour interview, join History Valley Podcast host Jacob Berman as he interviews Internet Infidels President John MacDonald about his synthesis of the evidence from biblical scholarship supporting Nina Livesey's thesis that the letters attributed to Paul were not written by Paul—and indeed that a historical Paul might have never have existed at all.

In this roughly half-hour bonus episode, Kiosk Editorial Review Committee member and Secular Web author Robert Shaw and guests Stuart Sorensen and Nick Cowan have a relaxed, fireside-style conversation about the recent failed prophecy of the End Times made by a South African preacher and explore the wider culture of doomsday predictions.

In this half-hour or so season finale, Kiosk Editorial Review Committee member and Secular Web author Robert Shaw and his guest—an atheist content creator from Kentucky who was raised in the Southern Baptist tradition— recount evolving from absorbing fire-and-brimstone sermons and young-Earth creationism to the world of digital activism. Along the way, the interlocutors delve into the challenges of a religious upbringing and deconversion before widening the discussion to the current political moment in the United States, where faith, power, and nationalism are tightly bound together.

In this half-hour or so discussion with Diana Jeater, Professor of African History at the University of Liverpool, Kiosk Editorial Review Committee member and Secular Web author Robert Shaw reviews indigenous African belief systems and ancestor traditions from the early arrival of Christianity and Islam to the explosive growth of Pentecostalism in recent decades. Along the way, the interlocutors discuss how African spiritual practices shaped—and were reshaped by—colonialism, why Pentecostal megachurches have spread so rapidly, and even touch on the provocative idea that the CIA may have had a hand in it. The conversation uncovers just how much Africa has to teach us about the entanglement of religion, culture, and politics.