Tune in for about an hour as host Edouard Tahmizian queries biblical scholar and Jesus mythicist Robert M. Price about topics ranging from how the Trinity doctrine's identification of Jesus and the Holy Spirit with God sits with the New Testament corpus, to whether or not Erasmus' Textus Receptus—or the 1611 King James Version of the Bible based on it—comes closest to the original biblical writings in light of subsequent historical discoveries. The discussion canvasses a number of different issues, such as Price's take on whether the story of Samson in the Book of Judges merely copies and recontextualizes the myth of Hercules for a Jewish audience, why the Gospel of Mark has four different endings (and whether any of these are faithful to the original Mark), the reasons for the contradictions in the different accounts of the death of Judas, why Matthew says that no one (apart from God) knows the day or hour of Jesus' second coming, and whether the author of Acts intentionally made a memetic parallel between a demon and the spirit of divination within the ancient Greek oracle at Delphi. Check out this wide-ranging interview with an long-time synthesizer of biblical scholarship!

Check out this about an hour return interview between host Edouard Tahmizian and Los Angeles constitutional lawyer Edward Tabash about two US Supreme Court cases decided at the end of June 2023 impacting the separation of church and state. In Groff v. DeJoy, the Court decided that a federal civil rights law requires employers to make substantial accommodations to federal workers’ religious views, forcing nonreligious workers to work on otherwise off days to cover religious workers observing the Sabbath. In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the Court decided that a Christian graphic designer has a special right to avoid complying with Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws by refusing requests to design websites for the weddings of same-sex couples. The new Court has developed a two-pronged strategy in dealing with First Amendment religious exercise cases, with Groff v. DeJoy exemplifying openly allowing government promotion of religious ideals, and 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis allowing religious exemptions to laws (such as anti-discrimination laws) that apply to institutions that serve purposes that are not religious. But as Tabash conclusively shows, the Founding Fathers clearly intended that nonbelievers be treated equal under the law to believers, undermining Religious Right claims that either the United States is a Christian Nation, or else that the First Amendment permits legal favoritism for religious belief generally over nonbelief. Tabash then turns to upcoming free exercise cases on their way to the Supreme Court and more pressing threats to nonbelievers’ constitutional rights.

Particularly disturbing are signs that the Religious Right is attempting to replace the existing US Constitution with a version that would undermine First Amendment rights by invoking Article 5, in which two-thirds of States (all Houses of 38 legislatures) can call for a Constitutional Convention. 19 States have already fully voted on this in all their legislative Houses, and 7 additional States already have one legislative House that has voted for this convention. The former include Nebraska, Georgia, Alaska, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arizona, North Dakota, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Utah, Nebraska, Wisconsin, West Virginia, and South Carolina, and the latter include New Mexico, Iowa, South Dakota, Virginia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Wyoming. Tabash believes that those in Nebraska or States where both houses have passed the Convention should contact their legislatures in both Houses (or the one House in Nebraska) asking them reverse the decision and repeal the convention call, while those in the latter should contact their representatives in the one legislature that has already voted for it and ask them to consider reversing their decision, and contact the representatives in the other, yet-to-ratify House and urge them not to ratify it. Those in remaining states, Tabash urges, should call members of both Houses of their state legislatures and urge them to vote against the resolution or decline to consider it.

Tune in to this roughly hour-long discussion between host Edouard Tahmizian and biblical scholar Robert M. Price as they discuss Robyn Faith Walsh's suggestion that the Gospels were written by elite cultural producers working within a dynamic cadre of literate specialists, specialists who may not even have been Christians, in light of Richard Carrier's response that the Gospel authors were clearly concerned missionaries. The discussion then turns to why the Gospel authors would do mimesis (mythologizing Jesus) if a significant proportion of their non-literary audience would not pick up on what they were doing, whether Price finds it plausible that early Christians believed (as Carrier maintains) that Jesus was crucified by sky demons in other realms (or that Jesus was a celestial mythical being that was eventually historicized for polemical purposes, as perhaps suggested in the Book of Revelation), whether Church Father Irenaeus was correct that the Book of Revelation was written circa 90-100 CE, whether Papias' account can be trusted as a historically accurate account of the early Gospel authors, whether first-century Israelites would've needed permission from Roman authorities to kill a suspected false prophet (typically by stoning, not Roman crucifixion), and why Gospel miracle accounts would be done in private among people who knew Jesus rather than out in public for everyone to see. Check out this novel overview of some of these debates with a seasoned biblical scholar!

Check out the second Freethinker Podcast interview between host Edouard Tahmizian and New Testament scholars Robyn Faith Walsh and Dennis R. MacDonald for about an hour as they review reactions to MacDonald's recent Synopses of Epic, Tragedy, and the Gospels from academics and Christian apologists, particularly on his account of mimesis (literary imitation mythologizing Jesus) and his alternative Q (the Logoi of Jesus), and then preview MacDonald's forthcoming Homer and the Quest for the Earliest Gospel on understanding the Gospels as mimetic projects that are contesting the canonical past of the Greeks, which in turn helps us understand how early Christians contested the canonical past of the Hebrew Bible (and brings us closer to understanding the world in which Jesus lived). The discussion then turns to why MacDonald dates the Q document back to the early 60s CE (such that no part of Q dates to the post-Temple period), the narrative differences that suggest to him that Papias predates Luke, how scholars reconstruct lost books from antiquity, where the attribution of names like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to the canonical Gospels came from (given that the early Q was simply anonymous sayings of Jesus), how promoting sacred texts as anonymous gives them more authority as revelations from God rather than simply the perspectives of particular people, how MacDonald applies social identity theory from sociology to generate a kind of social identity literary criticism to identify and stereotype the villain and the insider/protagonist in literature from antiquity, and much more. MacDonald ultimately explains why he doesn't feel comfortable attributing any sayings attributed to Jesus, in either the canonical Gospels or the earlier Q document, to the historical Jesus, though he does think that New Testament scholars can understand the alternative Jewish voice that the historical Jesus represented, which had an alternative understanding of Jewish laws than the predominant one at the time. The discussion ends on areas where MacDonald partially agrees, and partially disagrees, with Walsh. Tune in for a wide-ranging interview on a number of topics of great interest within biblical scholarship between top-notch experts in the field!

Check out the latest Freethinker Podcast interview with host Edouard Tahmizian for his roughly hour-long discussion with philosopher Stephen J. Sullivan about whether the position that God made us—and therefore he owns us—is a viable response to objections to classic (Plato-inspired) divine command theory, whether atheists can ground 'ought' statements (or at least moral duties) in the power of moral reasoning without need for a divine moral lawgiver, the role on biblical inconsistencies in countering ad hoc responses to objections to classic divine command theory, existentialist atheists like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, how fundamentalist Christians deal with the free will vs. determinism (or predestination) issue, and whether less conservative Christians are able to concede that the Bible is not inerrant without generating logical inconsistencies. Tune in for some deep insights from a moral philosopher who has thought about these topics for decades!

Tune in to Freethinker Podcast with host Edouard Tahmizian for an about an hour-and-fifteen-minute interview with panpsychist philosopher of mind Philip Goff as Tahmizian, Keith Augustine, and Jason Thibodeau query Goff about his reasons for embracing panpsychism, the view that all matter has some degree of a conscious or experiential element to it. Goff expertly fields questions from all three interlocuters about how his panpsychist views differ from those of other philosophers of mind and his rationale for taking this position. He suggests that "physicalist" Galen Strawson holds substantially the same view that he does, their differences largely being semantic ones about the meaning of the term physicalism (or materialism). Goff also responds to criticisms (like those of Massimo Pigliucci) that his picture of the mind is unscientific. He canvasses the hard problem of consciousness, structuralism about physics, why he favors taking the Russellian monist theory of mind in a specifically panpsychist direction, and what it might even mean to say that something like an electron has experiences. Goff also discusses whether arguing from a "top down" cosmopsychism (i.e., that the universe as a whole has experiential aspects, and divides down into our individual consciousnesses) is less problematic than arguing from the "bottom up" that the most fundamental constituents of matter have simple experiential aspects that somehow combine into our more complex, but unified, individual consciousnesses. The discussion then turns to Goff's take on the (classic, Plato-inspired) divine command theory of ethics, fine-tuning arguments, whether there's a middle way between traditional omni-God theism and traditional atheism that may be more attractive than either of those binary choices, whether libertarian free will exists given the possibility of determinism, and how his broader philosophical views impact the question of life's meaning. Check out this wide-ranging interview with a renowned philosopher of mind who has become increasingly prominent in public debates about these issues over the last several years!

Join host Edouard Tahmizian in this roughly 40-minute return interview with skeptical Catholic Vincent Torley, opening with his critique of recent defenses of long-popular Christian apologetics, such as his recent Skeptical Zone post on Gavin Ortlund's (unsuccessful) defense of C. S. Lewis' liar, lunatic, or lord trilemma on Cameron Bertuzzi's Capturing Christianity podcast in August 2022, an argument that actually goes back to its first formulation in the late 19th century by Scots preacher John Duncan ("Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine"). Torley notes that there are, in fact, seven or so alternatives, including that Jesus' divine status was merely a legend, that Jesus was mistaken without being insane, that Jesus was simply a mystic, or that Jesus never even existed as a historical figure at all, among other possibilities. Torley summarizes Ortlund's responses to these alternatives, which claim that they are not genuine possibilities for Jesus, and Ortlund's reasons for maintaining that Jesus was neither a "liar" nor a "lunatic," either. Torley then outlines the unintelligibility of the theological concepts of incarnation or the Trinity, despite recent attempts to make sense of them, before returning to the point that neither the traditional "lord, liar, or lunatic" nor modified "cosmic judge, liar, or lunatic" trilemma will be convincing in light of scriptural sources. Tahmizian then turns the discussion back to the unintelligibility of the incarnation and the Trinity, and how the human disposition to sin could possibly fit into such concepts, before closing on lighter topics like what life is like for Torley in Japan. Tune in for this fascinating discussion of an often-repeated but not particularly compelling apologetic argument!