Notes
Listen to this episode on Youtube
In this episode, I talk about exercising our critical thinking skills to avoid potential bullshit being sold to us. The referenced info-graphic can be found here: The Ultimate Cheat-sheet for Critical Thinking.
Chapters:
- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:38 Intro music
- 1:12 Religion suppresses critical thinking
- 1:50 Critical thinking isn’t taught in school
- 3:03 What is critical thinking?
- 3:38 A: Active listening
- 4:12 B: Be open-minded
- 4:53 C: Curiosity *
- 5:18 Why people stay in religion? *
- 6:50 D: Discipline
- 7:22 How to detect bullshit?
- 9:02 How to deal with evangelists? *
- 11:37 48 Critical Thinking Questions
- 13:38 Closing message
- 14:05 Outro and music
Transcript
What’s up, good people?
This is your host, Neil Rio, and this is the Apostate Apple broadcast.
Today.
I’m talking about how not to get fooled by religion, by what the media may be telling you, what your government may be telling you, what your socalled friend may be telling you about somebody else, what your boss may be telling you about what’s going on at your job.
Any scenario where you’re being and told something, you’re reading something or you’re hearing something.
How do you not get fooled?
Okay?
And the answer to that is critical thinking skills.
That’s what we’re going to be talking about today.
But before we get into that, critical thinking skills all about asking questions.
So if you don’t take anything away from this message here, just know that it’s important just to ask a lot of questions.
So we know that religion tries to suppress critical thinking.
It will tell you to accept something by faith.
You may not have no evidence, and you’re asking question, well, where’s the evidence?
Don’t worry about that.
Just accept it.
Things like that are something you cannot afford to do.
You cannot afford to walk in faith.
You have to have some level of evidence when it comes to something somebody’s presenting to you.
Critical thinking is not necessarily taught in schools.
I remember growing up, we were taught reading comprehension, which is to take in the meaning of something, to grasp it, the importance of it.
But we weren’t taught to criticize.
And so I remember a test where it’s like, sally went here and she did this and she did that.
What did Sally do the first time she went to this store?
What did she buy at the store?
And you have to just kind of regurgitate what you read to give the correct answer.
I remember when I was a member of the Cult of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, they had these books that we had to study.
And at the end of each chapter, there were several questions that they asked you.
Basically just like reading comprehension test at school.
And me and my father, my mother, we would all have our highlighters, highlight the answers, and then we would give the answers when we were asked to give the answers at the public church meetings.
And that’s how it would work.
And we would think we were doing something.
But nobody is criticizing what they’re reading.
They’re just comprehending what they read.
And so to criticize something means to judge the merits and faults of it, to analyze it, to evaluate it.
And so today I’m going to be talking about how to do that, at least giving you tools to do that.
So critical thinking has four parts, and they go in an alphabet order.
There’s A-B-C and D.
So the first one is active listening.
The second one is be open minded.
The third is curiosity.
The fourth is discipline.
Now, let me just go over these just to explain them.
The first one is active listening.
So in order to criticize something, you have to actively listen to what is being sold to you or what somebody is trying to sell to you.
So you have a gossiping friend.
You got somebody at work gossiping telling you something.
You got an evangelist talking to you trying to give you a track.
You got your government trying to tell you something.
You got the media trying to tell you something.
You have to listen clearly to what’s being said and withhold any judgments.
That’s the first thing, all right?
The second thing is be open minded.
So you got to see things from other people’s perspective.
You got to put aside any biases, any preconceived ideas, put them all to the side, be receptive to alternatives, and just be open and be willing to step out of your comfort zone and admit any previous mistakes.
If the information that’s being presented to you kind of corrects those things, you got to be humble.
So admit, you know what?
I was wrong on that, because this information has just now presented to me the truth and what I believe before was wrong.
So I’m going to let go of that false idea because it was wrong.
The next thing you got to do is be curious.
All right?
Choosing to surrender to uncertainty is what curiosity is all about.
You mean you’re stepping in, you’re stepping out, and you’re just asking more and more questions.
You may get uncomfortable because you’re going into a place where you could get hurt.
The truth may hurt you, but you have to be curious.
Now, the reason why I mentioned curiosity is because in the past, we always curious.
As children, we were curious.
We was always asking questions.
But what would happen is eventually, either a guardian or a parent of some kind would eventually tell us to stop asking so many questions.
Asking questions and being curious would get us hurt.
Meaning we might get a whooping or we told to shut up or harmed in some type of way or just information that we came across was like, scary.
He was like, oh, man.
So you started to not be curious and just kind of just say, well, I’m going to just deal with what’s certain.
I know this, so I’m going to just stick with that.
And that’s why a lot of people stay in religion, even though they present it with new information that says that their religion is harmful and it’s not correct.
I remember when I first tried to evangelize to my parents, I presented the information, but they’ve been in it for so long, and they didn’t want to move out of that.
All their friends and family is in it.
They had been in it as long as I was born.
So at the age of 23, I believe they had been in this for 23 years, even longer, probably for them to look at this and really examine it and walk away.
They’re scared.
So their curiosity, they’re not letting it go.
They’re not going to let go.
And so we have to become curious.
You have to become curious about anything being presented to you, these new ideas, anything coming to you.
And then finally, discipline must not jump to conclusions when you hear information that you don’t like.
You got to be able to manage your emotions.
And then while you’re doing that, evaluate and reflect on what you’re learning.
And so all of this is wrapped up into critical thinking.
I made the mistake of going in order, but there is no order.
Active listening can be second.
Curiosity, discipline, being open minded, and active listening is all a part of critical thinking.
While you’re criticizing what you’re being fed or what somebody is trying to feed you, if you run into issues where you cannot get the answers that you need, and the more you dig, you just seem to get all these blocks.
So there’s nothing there.
That’s an indication that what’s being sold to you is not the truth.
It’s faulty in some way and potentially harmful.
So keep that in mind.
If people can’t answer your questions, there’s a problem there.
The truth is open to questions.
The lie is like, don’t you ask me that.
Just accept it and move on, okay?
You get a very weird response from people that’s lying.
Now, I’m not saying these evangelists are knowingly lying to you, but when you talk to them and you can’t get answers, you got to be able to say, okay, something ain’t right.
You don’t know the answer to that, and you’re telling me something.
You haven’t even thought through this and you’re trying to sell this to me.
So we got to be people that ask questions.
And what are we doing?
We are weighing the merits and the faults of this particular belief, doctrine or idea, and we’re seeing whether or not we should accept it.
In some cases there are faults, but those faults are minimal and they don’t cause a lot of harm.
They don’t cause harm at all.
But then there’s things that are definitely a problem.
And this podcast reveals a lot of the issues with Christian religion.
I’ve mentioned so many of them in this podcast, so they outweigh the so called benefits.
So here’s some examples on how to deal with an evangelist.
Here’s an example of an evangelist, some Christian person, and by the way, at the recording of this message, the day before an evangelist came to me, I was at the grocery store and this lady kept looking at me and I and I’m thinking she just find me attractive or something like that.
But she hands me a track and says, Jesus loves you.
And I look down at the track and I realized what she said.
And I said, I don’t need that.
I already know about that.
And I give her back a track.
I just gave her back the track and moved on.
I was respectful and kind and nice because I know that they don’t know no better.
And that place wasn’t the place for me to get into a discussion about whether or not the character of Christ was real and all that.
But here’s what you can do.
Somebody comes up to you and talk about Jesus loves you.
I’m like, well, who is Jesus?
Well, Jesus.
You know who Jesus is?
He’s the Son of God.
Well, who is God?
Well, God created the heavens and the earth in the world.
And what is this track saying?
Well, you need to accept Jesus or are you going to die and go to h***.
Why am I going to h***?
Well, you’re a sinner.
Why am I a sinner?
What’s the sin?
What’s sin?
Well, sin is doing bad things.
We’ve all done stuff against our conscience, right?
Yeah, I know.
Okay, why am I going to h***?
Because that’s wrong, and God is judging you and you need to listen to what I’m saying.
I’m just going to keep asking questions.
Okay, well, who is this guy and where is he at?
Can I talk to him?
Yeah, you can pray to him, but is he going to respond back?
Where is he?
Well, he’s invisible.
What do you mean he’s invisible?
You can’t see him.
Okay.
It’s Jesus character.
That’s his son, right?
You said?
Yeah, he’s his son and he died for your sins.
Okay, so what am I supposed to do?
What is h*** then, by the way?
Well, h*** is a place of eternal torment for people who are sinners, and you’re a sinner.
And so to avoid going to h***, you need to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior.
Okay, but the question you can ask then is where is h*** and how do you know h*** exists?
And how do you know Jesus exists?
And who are these people at that point?
Usually they’ll say, why don’t you come to my church?
And my pastor will try to help you answer these questions for you.
You see, so a lot of evangelists can’t even answer the basic questions you have, but all you got to do is keep asking questions.
You have to evaluate and ask questions after questions after question.
So I came across this infographic.
It has 48 critical thinking questions on it.
And I’m not going to read all of these.
I’m going to just link this in the show notes.
But I thought it was great, and it basically goes back to the old school who, what, when, where, why, and how.
Okay, so it has 48 questions.
I’m not going to read all of them, but it says, who benefits from this?
So you can ask yourself that.
Somebody is trying to sell you something.
Who benefits from this?
Who is harmed by this?
Who is this harmful to?
Who is most directly affected?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of following Jesus?
What is another perspective?
And that’s one thing people don’t look at.
There’s a ton of other religions other than Jesus, jesus Christ, and Christianity.
Outside of the Abrahamic religions, there’s a ton of other stuff, and they got all different types of beliefs.
So it’s important that if somebody’s trying to sell you one side, it’s important that you look at the other side.
That’s why a lot of people, when they go to college and they study religion, they find out that everybody got a different perspective, and all of them are saying one thing against the other.
And you’re like, okay, I see what’s going on here, okay?
And it pretty much nullifies everything.
It’s like, I’m not picking that.
I’m not doing this.
I’m not following that.
So it just got a lot of really great questions here, and I encourage anybody to print this out and put this on their wall for anything.
Not just some religious or spiritual group coming to you to sell you something, but the media.
You can run this across a news story, a so called friend telling you about what somebody did in in your circle, some gossip, something at work.
You can break this down and really dissect what’s being said to see if it holds weight and merit.
All you got to do is keep asking questions.
Y’all, don’t just take something face value.
Don’t accept nothing by faith.
Just don’t listen to somebody say something bad about somebody or a particular group.
This will be linked in the show notes.
We have to be better at what we’re told about people, groups, people that you don’t know, religion, spirituality, what the media is telling you about your world.
We have to be able to criticize things.
All right, so until next time, like share subscribe rate this podcast I thank you for listening to The End, and have a good week.