Épisodes

  • #045 – Roko's Basilisk, Pope Watch 2025, and Paula White

    #045 – Roko's Basilisk, Pope Watch 2025, and Paula White
    Mar 4 2025
    Before you listen to today's episode, you should know that knowing about Roko's Basilisk can doom you forever. Still here? Great. This week, John and Kelly explore a few of the religion stories that have surfaced in recent weeks, including what happens and if when Pope Francis dies soon, and the evangelical backlash of Trump appointing Paula White as the White House Faith officer. Then, we take on Roko's Basilisk, an unhinged thought experiment about the moral imperative of helping to develop super-intelligent A.I. that, as it happens, also helps explain Elon Musk's zealous, eugenicist project to dismantle the federal government. We promise it matters!
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    56 min
  • (Edited Reissue) #024 - Simulation Theory, or Young Earth Creationism for Atheists

    (Edited Reissue) #024 - Simulation Theory, or Young Earth Creationism for Atheists
    Feb 27 2025
    We recorded this about a year ago, for the 25th anniversary of the release of THE MATRIX. But since Elon Musk now controls the country, we're republishing an edited-down version because it's important to know how Musk thinks. Next episode, we'll be talking about a number of the other beliefs that shape Musk's worldview, among them Roko's Basilisk, so this episode is good preparation for that conversation. ************************************************************************************ In 2003, Oxford University philosophy professor Nick Bostrom published a paper titled Are You Living in a Computer Simulation, thus giving rise to the modern incarnation of Simulation Theory, which posits that our experienced reality is actually the product of an advanced (possibly future-self) civilization running a simulation experiment. But the paper on might have been written off as a useful thought experiment had it not been for the popularity of the 1999 film The Matrix, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, and its two sequels, which came out the same year as Bostrom's paper. In the years since, Simulation Theory has become a lot of things to a lot of people - from a fun metaphor to explain Cartesian philosophy to college freshmen to an all-out article of faith for an increasingly doctrinaire sub-culture of futurists. How useful (or even likely) is Simulation Theory? In honor of The Matrix's birthday, John and Kelly decided to take up that question. Sources https://simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf https://builtin.com/hardware/simulation-theory https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-in-a-simulation-chances-are-about-50-50/ https://www.wired.com/story/living-in-a-simulation/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/
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    48 min
  • Chris Kluwe - (Republished from "Hard to Believe" - April, 2021)

    Chris Kluwe - (Republished from "Hard to Believe" - April, 2021)
    Feb 21 2025
    This is a republished episode from John's former podcast Hard to Believe featuring an interview with Chris Kluwe In light Kluwe making national news with his recent act of anti-MAGA civil disobedience, we decided to republish an interview John conducted with Kluwe in 2021, in which he describes, among other things, how he came to be an activist and advocate for justice causes. Here is the original descriptions of that episode: ******************************************************************** Chris Kluwe was an accomplished NFL punter with the Minnesota Vikings. Then he decided to stand up for the rights of other human beings. Now he's a science fiction novelist. And a lot has happened in between. His first science fiction novel, Otaku, was just released in paperback, so he and John sat across the internet from each other to talk about where he gets his sense of social responsibility, his evolution as a writer, and how it feels to be the only person in American history to have used the term "lustful cockmonster" in a letter to a sitting elected official. Find out where to buy Otaku from somewhere other than Amazon here You can try not to get blocked by Chris by following him on Twitter @ChrisWarcraft Clips from the beginning of this episode come from: CNN, MSNBC, The Young Turks, The Dan Patrick Show, Geek and Sundry, Larry King Now, and Conan The outro is a cover of "Science Fiction / Double Feature" by Tall Dark Whimsy
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    1 h et 1 min
  • #044 – The Lord of the Right: Tolkien, Fascism, and Race - with Marika Rose

    #044 – The Lord of the Right: Tolkien, Fascism, and Race - with Marika Rose
    Feb 18 2025
    What's the deal with the far-right's obsession with Tolkien? Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is, ostensibly, a story of different races coming together to defeat a shared enemy - one that intends to shroud the world in darkness and despair. Or...is it? If you ask billionaire fascist Peter Thiel - whose surveillance company Palantir is named for an evil crystal ball in Lord of the Rings - the answer isn't so simple. Nor is it for self-proclaimed "Tolkien guy" and Thiel protege JD Vance. Is the fascism-leaning right-wing and the TradCath movement justified in declaring Tolkien one of their own? And even if they're not, can we reconcile the racism inherent in Lord of the Rings with its apparent message of fellowship and perseverance in the face of an existential threat? Those questions have kept Tolkien scholars busy for 80 years, but we talked through some of them with scholar Marika Rose. You can find out more about Marika as well as links to some of the sources for this episode below: Marika Rose Marika on Bluesky How Lord of the Rings Shaped JD Vance’s Politics Revisiting Race in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Constructing Cultures and Ideologies in an Imaginary World How The Lord of the Rings became a symbol for Italy's far-right ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Is Not the Far Right’s Playground Tolkien and Race
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    1 h et 10 min
  • #043 – The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover with Lerone A. Martin

    #043 – The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover with Lerone A. Martin
    Feb 4 2025
    This week, Kelly and John are joined by Lerone A. Martin to discuss his unfortunately timely and prescient book, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism. Martin is the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor in Religious Studies, African & African American Studies, and The Nina C. Crocker Faculty Scholar. He also serves as the Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. He's is an award-winning author. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover was published in February 2023 by Princeton University Press. The book has garnered praise from numerous publications including The Nation, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, Publisher’s Weekly, and History Today. In 2014 he published, Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Making of Modern African American Religion. That book received the 2015 first book award by the American Society of Church History. His commentary and writing have been featured on The NBC Today Show, The History Channel, PBS, CSPAN, and NPR, as well as in The New York Times, Boston Globe, CNN.com, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He currently serves as an advisor on the upcoming PBS documentary series The History of Gospel Music & Preaching.
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    1 h et 2 min
  • #042 – Jason Kirk on "Hell Is A World Without You"

    #042 – Jason Kirk on "Hell Is A World Without You"
    Jan 21 2025
    Writer and journalist Jason Kirk's debut novel, Hell is a World Without You, was released in December of 2023 to wide acclaim. Hell is a World Without You tells the story of Isaac Siena, an Evangelical teenager living in Pennsylvania at the turn of the millennium who struggles with the dual-challenges of adolescence and his faith. The novel is drawn from elements of Kirk's own life and is set against the backdrop of an America in the wake of Y2K and on the verge of 9/11. Kirk is a senior editor for The Athletic and cohosts the podcast Vacation Bible School with his wife Emily. He joined Kelly and John to talk about drawing from his own experiences to write a novel that would speak to people both within and without the youth evangelical experience, his faith journey, and who is going to win the Super Bowl (it's the Bills, apparently - take it to the bank). You can learn more about him and read some of his work at https://www.jasonkirk.fyi/
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    1 h et 10 min
  • #041 – A Load of Comstock - The life and times of Anthony Comstock

    #041 – A Load of Comstock - The life and times of Anthony Comstock
    Jan 7 2025
    Anthony Comstock might be the most significant American that it's entirely possible you've never heard of. A zealous Christian crusader against so-called "obscenity" in the late 19th century, he is the namesake of the Comstock Act, the interstate commerce law that the Heritage Foundation plans to use to curb access to abortion pills and pornography. Born in Connecticut in the mid-1800s, Anthony Comstock grew up with regressive Victorian ideals in a puritanical New England household. His self-loathing and religious zeal lead to a life of bullying and persecuting countless men and (more often) women, driving many to suicide and tallying up hundreds of years in prison sentences. The radical social dynamics at the time in many ways echo our current culture wars, and since Anthony Comstock is about to play a major role in American life again, we thought it would be useful to talk a bit about his life and times. Much of the information for this episode was drawn from Amy Sohn's book The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age Also helpful were the biography of Comstock from the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum and TheFire.org's Why the 1873 Comstock Act still matters today
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    1 h et 22 min
  • #040 – Did Dickens "Invent" Christmas? - with Kristen Hanley Cardozo

    #040 – Did Dickens "Invent" Christmas? - with Kristen Hanley Cardozo
    Dec 24 2024
    The 2017 film The Man Who Invented Christmas, starring human treasure Dan Stevens as Charles Dickens, is a lovely bit of an anachronistic historical revisionism (though, to be fair, it gets a number of things right both in fact and in, pardon the pun, spirit). But it also perpetuates an increasingly popular myth - that Charles Dickens...well...invented Christmas. At least, that is, Christmas as we think of it today. There are a lot of reasons why this seems true, and, yes, Dicken's A Christmas Carol played an enormous role in a Victorian revival and redefining of Christmas - but that revival was happening with him or without him. So we decided to take a closer look at Victorian society in the 1940s and exam how religious - or not - Dickens and A Christmas Carol actually were. Kelly and John invited Victorianist Kristen Hanley Cardozo to share some of her expertise and talk about spirits, Scrooges, and the real reasons for the season.
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    1 h et 8 min