{"id":541,"date":"2022-10-05T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-05T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blubrry.com\/apostate_apple\/90153242\/how-not-to-be-fooled-by-religion-media-or-anyone-else\/"},"modified":"2022-10-05T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-10-05T16:00:00","slug":"how-not-to-be-fooled-by-religion-media-or-anyone-else","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/how-not-to-be-fooled-by-religion-media-or-anyone-else\/","title":{"rendered":"How NOT to Be Fooled by Religion or Anything Else"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pinterest.com\/pin\/402368547970833204\/?nic_v3=1a1IzYYPo\">The Ultimate Cheat-sheet for Critical Thinking<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Chapters:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>0:00 Introduction<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>0:38 Intro music<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>1:12 Religion suppresses critical thinking<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>1:50 Critical thinking isn&#8217;t taught in school<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>3:03 What is critical thinking?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>3:38 A: Active listening<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>4:12 B: Be open-minded<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>4:53 C: Curiosity *<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>5:18 Why people stay in religion? *<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>6:50 D: Discipline<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>7:22 How to detect bullshit?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>9:02 How to deal with evangelists? *<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>11:37 48 Critical Thinking Questions<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>13:38 Closing message<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>14:05 Outro and music<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-how-to","category-psychology"],"acf":{"file_name":"aa-ep20-critical-thinking","duration":"15:46","ep_num":20,"file_size":14,"transcript_content":"What's up, good people?\n\nThis is your host, Neil Rio, and this is the Apostate Apple broadcast.\n\nToday.\n\nI'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.\n\nAny scenario where you're being and told something, you're reading something or you're hearing something.\n\nHow do you not get fooled?\n\nOkay?\n\nAnd the answer to that is critical thinking skills.\n\nThat's what we're going to be talking about today.\n\nBut before we get into that, critical thinking skills all about asking questions.\n\nSo if you don't take anything away from this message here, just know that it's important just to ask a lot of questions.\n\nSo we know that religion tries to suppress critical thinking.\n\nIt will tell you to accept something by faith.\n\nYou may not have no evidence, and you're asking question, well, where's the evidence?\n\nDon't worry about that.\n\nJust accept it.\n\nThings like that are something you cannot afford to do.\n\nYou cannot afford to walk in faith.\n\nYou have to have some level of evidence when it comes to something somebody's presenting to you.\n\nCritical thinking is not necessarily taught in schools.\n\nI remember growing up, we were taught reading comprehension, which is to take in the meaning of something, to grasp it, the importance of it.\n\nBut we weren't taught to criticize.\n\nAnd so I remember a test where it's like, sally went here and she did this and she did that.\n\nWhat did Sally do the first time she went to this store?\n\nWhat did she buy at the store?\n\nAnd you have to just kind of regurgitate what you read to give the correct answer.\n\nI remember when I was a member of the Cult of the Jehovah's Witnesses, they had these books that we had to study.\n\nAnd at the end of each chapter, there were several questions that they asked you.\n\nBasically just like reading comprehension test at school.\n\nAnd 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.\n\nAnd that's how it would work.\n\nAnd we would think we were doing something.\n\nBut nobody is criticizing what they're reading.\n\nThey're just comprehending what they read.\n\nAnd so to criticize something means to judge the merits and faults of it, to analyze it, to evaluate it.\n\nAnd so today I'm going to be talking about how to do that, at least giving you tools to do that.\n\nSo critical thinking has four parts, and they go in an alphabet order.\n\nThere's A-B-C and D.\n\nSo the first one is active listening.\n\nThe second one is be open minded.\n\nThe third is curiosity.\n\nThe fourth is discipline.\n\nNow, let me just go over these just to explain them.\n\nThe first one is active listening.\n\nSo 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.\n\nSo you have a gossiping friend.\n\nYou got somebody at work gossiping telling you something.\n\nYou got an evangelist talking to you trying to give you a track.\n\nYou got your government trying to tell you something.\n\nYou got the media trying to tell you something.\n\nYou have to listen clearly to what's being said and withhold any judgments.\n\nThat's the first thing, all right?\n\nThe second thing is be open minded.\n\nSo you got to see things from other people's perspective.\n\nYou 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.\n\nIf the information that's being presented to you kind of corrects those things, you got to be humble.\n\nSo admit, you know what?\n\nI was wrong on that, because this information has just now presented to me the truth and what I believe before was wrong.\n\nSo I'm going to let go of that false idea because it was wrong.\n\nThe next thing you got to do is be curious.\n\nAll right?\n\nChoosing to surrender to uncertainty is what curiosity is all about.\n\nYou mean you're stepping in, you're stepping out, and you're just asking more and more questions.\n\nYou may get uncomfortable because you're going into a place where you could get hurt.\n\nThe truth may hurt you, but you have to be curious.\n\nNow, the reason why I mentioned curiosity is because in the past, we always curious.\n\nAs children, we were curious.\n\nWe was always asking questions.\n\nBut what would happen is eventually, either a guardian or a parent of some kind would eventually tell us to stop asking so many questions.\n\nAsking questions and being curious would get us hurt.\n\nMeaning 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.\n\nHe was like, oh, man.\n\nSo you started to not be curious and just kind of just say, well, I'm going to just deal with what's certain.\n\nI know this, so I'm going to just stick with that.\n\nAnd 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.\n\nI 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.\n\nAll their friends and family is in it.\n\nThey had been in it as long as I was born.\n\nSo 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.\n\nThey're scared.\n\nSo their curiosity, they're not letting it go.\n\nThey're not going to let go.\n\nAnd so we have to become curious.\n\nYou have to become curious about anything being presented to you, these new ideas, anything coming to you.\n\nAnd then finally, discipline must not jump to conclusions when you hear information that you don't like.\n\nYou got to be able to manage your emotions.\n\nAnd then while you're doing that, evaluate and reflect on what you're learning.\n\nAnd so all of this is wrapped up into critical thinking.\n\nI made the mistake of going in order, but there is no order.\n\nActive listening can be second.\n\nCuriosity, discipline, being open minded, and active listening is all a part of critical thinking.\n\nWhile 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.\n\nSo there's nothing there.\n\nThat's an indication that what's being sold to you is not the truth.\n\nIt's faulty in some way and potentially harmful.\n\nSo keep that in mind.\n\nIf people can't answer your questions, there's a problem there.\n\nThe truth is open to questions.\n\nThe lie is like, don't you ask me that.\n\nJust accept it and move on, okay?\n\nYou get a very weird response from people that's lying.\n\nNow, 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.\n\nYou don't know the answer to that, and you're telling me something.\n\nYou haven't even thought through this and you're trying to sell this to me.\n\nSo we got to be people that ask questions.\n\nAnd what are we doing?\n\nWe 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.\n\nIn some cases there are faults, but those faults are minimal and they don't cause a lot of harm.\n\nThey don't cause harm at all.\n\nBut then there's things that are definitely a problem.\n\nAnd this podcast reveals a lot of the issues with Christian religion.\n\nI've mentioned so many of them in this podcast, so they outweigh the so called benefits.\n\nSo here's some examples on how to deal with an evangelist.\n\nHere'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.\n\nBut she hands me a track and says, Jesus loves you.\n\nAnd I look down at the track and I realized what she said.\n\nAnd I said, I don't need that.\n\nI already know about that.\n\nAnd I give her back a track.\n\nI just gave her back the track and moved on.\n\nI was respectful and kind and nice because I know that they don't know no better.\n\nAnd 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.\n\nBut here's what you can do.\n\nSomebody comes up to you and talk about Jesus loves you.\n\nI'm like, well, who is Jesus?\n\nWell, Jesus.\n\nYou know who Jesus is?\n\nHe's the Son of God.\n\nWell, who is God?\n\nWell, God created the heavens and the earth in the world.\n\nAnd what is this track saying?\n\nWell, you need to accept Jesus or are you going to die and go to h***.\n\nWhy am I going to h***?\n\nWell, you're a sinner.\n\nWhy am I a sinner?\n\nWhat's the sin?\n\nWhat's sin?\n\nWell, sin is doing bad things.\n\nWe've all done stuff against our conscience, right?\n\nYeah, I know.\n\nOkay, why am I going to h***?\n\nBecause that's wrong, and God is judging you and you need to listen to what I'm saying.\n\nI'm just going to keep asking questions.\n\nOkay, well, who is this guy and where is he at?\n\nCan I talk to him?\n\nYeah, you can pray to him, but is he going to respond back?\n\nWhere is he?\n\nWell, he's invisible.\n\nWhat do you mean he's invisible?\n\nYou can't see him.\n\nOkay.\n\nIt's Jesus character.\n\nThat's his son, right?\n\nYou said?\n\nYeah, he's his son and he died for your sins.\n\nOkay, so what am I supposed to do?\n\nWhat is h*** then, by the way?\n\nWell, h*** is a place of eternal torment for people who are sinners, and you're a sinner.\n\nAnd so to avoid going to h***, you need to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior.\n\nOkay, but the question you can ask then is where is h*** and how do you know h*** exists?\n\nAnd how do you know Jesus exists?\n\nAnd who are these people at that point?\n\nUsually they'll say, why don't you come to my church?\n\nAnd my pastor will try to help you answer these questions for you.\n\nYou 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.\n\nYou have to evaluate and ask questions after questions after question.\n\nSo I came across this infographic.\n\nIt has 48 critical thinking questions on it.\n\nAnd I'm not going to read all of these.\n\nI'm going to just link this in the show notes.\n\nBut I thought it was great, and it basically goes back to the old school who, what, when, where, why, and how.\n\nOkay, so it has 48 questions.\n\nI'm not going to read all of them, but it says, who benefits from this?\n\nSo you can ask yourself that.\n\nSomebody is trying to sell you something.\n\nWho benefits from this?\n\nWho is harmed by this?\n\nWho is this harmful to?\n\nWho is most directly affected?\n\nWhat are the strengths and weaknesses of following Jesus?\n\nWhat is another perspective?\n\nAnd that's one thing people don't look at.\n\nThere's a ton of other religions other than Jesus, jesus Christ, and Christianity.\n\nOutside of the Abrahamic religions, there's a ton of other stuff, and they got all different types of beliefs.\n\nSo it's important that if somebody's trying to sell you one side, it's important that you look at the other side.\n\nThat'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.\n\nAnd you're like, okay, I see what's going on here, okay?\n\nAnd it pretty much nullifies everything.\n\nIt's like, I'm not picking that.\n\nI'm not doing this.\n\nI'm not following that.\n\nSo 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.\n\nNot just some religious or spiritual group coming to you to sell you something, but the media.\n\nYou 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.\n\nYou can break this down and really dissect what's being said to see if it holds weight and merit.\n\nAll you got to do is keep asking questions.\n\nY'all, don't just take something face value.\n\nDon't accept nothing by faith.\n\nJust don't listen to somebody say something bad about somebody or a particular group.\n\nThis will be linked in the show notes.\n\nWe 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.\n\nWe have to be able to criticize things.\n\nAll right, so until next time, like share subscribe rate this podcast I thank you for listening to The End, and have a good week.","youtube":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=k-fk0g5u4uI"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nealreal.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}