Morals Without God: A Conversation with Bobby Walker Part 1

That one little thing when I was like, wow, I was wrong. I was so serious about this and didn't have a good reason to be so serious about it. I'm better off now because I'm now closer to God. I'm closer to following God's word as it's written. I really need to open my eyes and stop just believing some of these things that we've been taught. And it just sent me on a path. And if you hear this story, most atheists I know in, you know, here in the U.S. you know, in our cultural Christianity is pretty much always the same because most people ask the question that you guys asked this way, you're an atheist.

What happened?

Welcome to the Sole Proprietor podcast. I'm Curt Kempton.

And I'm Melody Edwards.

Each week we dive into the ethical questions that keep entrepreneurs awake at night.

Whether you're building your own company or exploring life's big questions, you are welcome here.

Good morning, Melody. How are you today?

Morning is great, Curt, except it's 2pm in the afternoon.

Well, Melody, that's cool and all, but don't forget, all of our listeners have to listen to our podcast in the morning.

Curt. No, that's not true. They can listen in the afternoon or the evening.

No, no, Melody, we told everybody how they had to live their life. They have to listen. And 8am in the morning, the day after it comes out. You don't remember the memo?

I don't, but this is weird because I don't remember ever setting that. Is this your authority?

Yes, this is my authority. I just decided to make it so. And it's the perfect lead into today's guest. I am telling everybody how to live their life and giving them very specific rules. I'm taking it obviously a lot farther than I actually believe it to be, but we're having on a very dear friend of mine, Bobby Walker, who is joining us as our atheist correspondent out in the field. I like that I am here, but.

Who'S your dear friend that's joining?

Yeah, well, I like you, just not that much. Is that how the saying goes?

Something like that.

So for those of you who don't know Bobby Walker, and if you don't, well, sorry for you, but Bobby and I have been friends for a real long time. Other than my wife, he's become my best friend. I don't talk to my best friends often as I'd like to, by any means. Just tells you how far second place is behind Rachel. The point is, Bobby and I met as business owners. I Make software. He has a cleaning company that uses my software. And we had all this different interactions throughout the beginning.

And I wish I could tell you guys about every single one of them, but I want to just talk about one specific interaction that will really, in a nutshell, Nutshell, cover my relationship with Bobby. So we were at a conference, I believe it was in Myrtle Beach. It was a very rainy conference. Bobby and I get into pretty deep conversations, but we also have a lot of light ones. You know, I love his family. He loves mine. We're just tight. Like, you got to understand that.

And so we're going out to go find a bite to eat, and it's drizzling a little bit. We walk out, and there's an alley we got to walk through. And this alley is pretty deep in water. Bobby, without really even thinking too much of, is like, here, hop on my back. So I hop on his back.

He's a little guy. He's not a very big guy.

Well, for those of you who aren't watching the video, Bobby Walker is often confused with cold stone. No, not cold stone.

Cold stone. That's actually the truth.

Steve Austin. He's big. He's strong. He's got a bald head. He's got the menacing face. He's a. I don't want to tell everybody he's a teddy bear, because then people might, like, try to take him away from me. But the point is, is he has me hop on his back, and he's walking through the alley so that my feet don't get wet.

We walk into the restaurant. We're having a great conversation, but he, for whatever reason, just starts teasing the. The waitress. And I don't remember all the circumstances behind it, but it was like. I'm like, Bobby. I think she thinks that we're partners, like, we're a gay couple. And Bobby leaned into that.

I was like, we're not. That's a different podcast.

We ended up getting a great picture. She brought us out a dessert. Strawberries with chocolate. And to your bromance, I think, is what it said on it. So there's a little history of Bobby, myself. Love this guy. And, Mellie, you and I decided we want to. We talk a lot about sort of faith or lack thereof.

We've talked about entrepreneurship and how morals and all that stuff ties in. I really think that atheism, you know, even personally, is very misunderstood. And Bobby's story covers a lot of ground. So I thought, nellie, we gotta have Bobby on. Just sort of, like to add that extra element to what we can't do on our own.

I won't even let you call me an atheist or anything even close to that. But I also refuse to be called anything else.

So you're my favorite atheist, Melody.

I'm not an atheist. How dare you.

What are you gonna do about it?

I don't know. What I say is maybe I don't believe in God. I'm not sure, but I definitely am going to hell. So there's like a real issue for in my brain, the bad stuff that they teach you, never for me, has never been able to leave me. And also I'm exploring what does that mean to me.

Could we define the term atheist, at least for this context?

Well, that's what we were going to ask you first. How do you define atheism?

I would love it if in your definition of atheism, if you wouldn't mind also sort of sharing. I know you and I have discussed something similar to what Melody was just saying in your definition. Maybe you can also talk about it means when you first become one, coming out of like a really strong faith too.

That's a different question. And that's a. We could probably spend damn near the whole podcast on that.

Bobby, you're our atheist correspondent now, so there'll be more of this in the future.

Okay, well, I'm down for that. I do. I used to have a podcast and a YouTube channel and stuff, and that's a past chapter and it needs to be for me. And you know, you never say never, but I've been looking forward to this because this is different than that. So I'm really looking forward to that. And I wouldn't even mind you, I enjoy this conversation when it's with people that are able to have it without just turn it into ad hominem attacks. You know, you're just an atheist because you want to do X. And I'm like, but I do less sinning than most Christians I know, but they're so Christians.

I know what to tell you, you know, and that's a joke. I mean, I know I do less than some and more than others, but let me answer the question twice, once in five seconds. And what's once in a minute? What is an atheist? The way I see it, you know, because words don't have hard definitions, you know, they have usages, I guess you could say. But if someone proposes the question, there is a God, and if your answer is anything other than I accept that to be truth, you'd be an atheist. An atheist is Someone that doesn't accept the proposition that there's a God. So that's the five second answer and then the slightly bigger one. And I think it's where things do get misconstrued with what one may be. But there's two kind of things that we deal with when we're talking about, well, religious stuff in particularly, and it's belief and then knowledge.

So a theist is one that would say I do believe in God. You know, a space theist, one that is atheist. Someone that does believe in God. So an atheist would say I don't. But then that's our belief spectrum. Right. And we all believe things that we may not know to be true. I believe that there's a, all these circuits that do all these things in my iPhone, but I don't really know how that works.

Maybe it's magic, I don't know.

I have an example. I believe that people's souls become stars because that makes me feel good. And I definitely don't know that that's true. But stars are energy.

That's a great example. Okay, the other axis would be knowledge. You at least claim to know something or don't. When people hear atheists, they think, you know, God hating baby eater. Or they think someone that says, you know, there is no God. And that's a fact. I will admit I believe there are no gods out there. I do believe that, can't know it.

The world's a big place in my infinite life or finite life. I'm not going to know it. So on this two axis we got belief and we have knowledge. So if I am an atheist, one without theism, I can either say I know there's no God and that's. Now we're talking about Gnosticism, right? Knowledge. So I could be a gnostic atheist. That would be someone that says I know there's no God. I could be an agnostic atheist which says, I don't believe there's a God, but I don't claim to have that knowledge.

You can be a theist and I've known both. You can be a theist that says I believe in God, but I don't know if he's real. That would be an agnostic theist because they believe but they don't claim knowledge. And then you can have someone which is most Christians here in America, that I know. Or you could be a gnostic theist. I believe in God and I know he's real. By definition I would fall in the agnostic atheist camp. But that's just because I can acknowledge the fact that I haven't turned over every rock in the universe.

But that's.

That that was amazing. That was such a good definition of everything because, I mean, I've heard the definitions before, but you were able to just bang it out in a way that's. So I just get that I've had.

Enough people tell me what I am and be wrong about it that I had to put. I didn't come up with this on my own, but I had to put enough research into just to be like, I'm just going to tell you one time. And if you, you know, if you want to tell me I'm lying or tell me what I believe. Well, if you're a mind reader, there's no need for this conversation. We can move on, you know, So I had to dial that in a little bit for my own sanity.

What I like about that example so much is that you used axises, axi, axises, axopotami. I think they have continuum on them. And so knowledge gets to the very end of that continuum where, like, I'm more sure that there's a God than not sure. And so I'm going to find myself somewhere on that axis moving towards knowledge, but not like there. I haven't arrived where I think that. I think there's other people who maybe use the term, like, hey, it's better to believe and be wrong than it is to not believe and be wrong.

That's a horrible argument. I'd love to dissect that for the audience.

I know. I knew I was going to hit a nerve there, but those people actually don't believe or they're. I'm going to go ahead and fake believe. Maybe is one way of saying it. Go the other direction.

I'm going to trick God. I'm going to trick this God that requires me to genuinely love, honor, serve him. I'm just going to pretend I believe in him so that way if I die, he gets tricked and I get into heaven. It's a silly argument, in my opinion.

It is. Well, when you say it like that. Yeah.

Now that we kind of know what atheist means to you, I actually. Mel, I'll let you ask the question because we can have the rest of the podcast on this.

I know what the question would be is, do you believe in anything anymore? What do you believe in? Would be a better question.

I probably believe in everything you do, except for a guide, more than likely if I told you, hey, I don't believe that people in the Stock market are actually investing money in things. And this. I, I don't believe that's happening. I believe that Illuminati is just doing some weird stuff and blah, blah. You know, like, I don't believe that the stock market's legit. Right. I don't believe it really exists. If someone said to me, well, what do you believe in? I'm like, everything else.

That's a great point. But I think the reason why we. Why I'm asking that question has not been said to the audience, which is you were a believer before.

Yes.

And that is why that comes up for any believer. Like, talk a little bit about your background so that people can have that context.

I know what you mean when you ask that question. I know, you know, trying to ham it up with. For the audience a little bit. But I used to use that question myself, and it was 20% genuine curiosity and 80% insult. You know, back when I was a believer, I remember a church I used to attend, we would have, like, you could call it Sunday school. It wasn't that. But, you know, some discussion, you know, reading group things. And they were talking about how the, you know, the atheist group there in Tulsa met at this coffee house over there.

And, you know, they made some friends with them. And, you know, the pastor had. So they were just talking about that, and one of them kind of spoke up and says, well, if they're atheists, like, what are they actually even talking about? Which I chuckled myself back then. And I'm like, Durga. Which the funny thing is the pastor, who was pretty respectful, responded and said, I asked him the same question. And he said, usually half of their meetings are reading death threats that are sent to them by theists. I was like, that was a good one, you know, to kind of dig into this question. So first off, I was a believer, a Christian, a Protestant would probably be the best broad brush to use.

Or an evangelical, even better, you know, here in the U.S. well, were you born again?

Were you born again, or did you grow up like this?

I would say I was convinced. I was. I grew up culturally in Christianity. Just because you're from Oklahoma, so even if you're at grandma's kegger on the weekend, we're still thanking God for everything and so on and so forth. I had a lot of experience with church in general. I have an uncle that was a minister. So I grew up believing, you know, went to church camp a few times as a kid and just was, I would say, a cultural Christian. And when I was in high school, Pretty positive.

It was my junior year in high school. There was this girl I liked, so her and I started going out, which we didn't go anywhere. That's just what you called it back in the day. But we were going out, and she got invited to church, so I went to church with her, and she and I ended up breaking up, and I ended up marrying Jesus. Right. You know, so that was kind of my. My thing back then. And, you know, I was very.

At least by my standards and my definitions, you know, very devout. I do tend to be an obsessive type of person. And when that same church I was telling you about with the atheist story one time, we were having a conversation about the three main Jewish sects that existed during, like, Jesus's time. And there was, you know, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Zealots. And they were like, so what kind of Christians do you know that are Pharisees? You know, what kind of Christians, you know, would fall in this? And it wasn't an insulting thing. It was, like, based on what they believe. And then they were like, what about the Zealots? And two people just turned at me and they go, bobby, you know.

That is so telling. I love that.

So, you know, I guess you could just say I was all in if you wanted to say something like that. So, met my wife at that same church. You know, we've been married now for more years than I can count anymore. But we. We've been together for a long time. And, you know, my groom's cake at my wedding was an open book that said, in the shape of an open book that said, go ye unto all the world and preach the gospel. We were, you know, volunteers at our church, at that particular church. Ended up becoming staff members at a little church, you know, let's call it, like, country type of churches, you know, but we were on staff at a country church.

It wasn't in the country, but for about three years. And my deconversion, and we might get back to this, we'll put a pin in it, but my deconversion kind of started, you know, as a result of my experience in the ministry.

And can I ask a question about your background, though, too, because you were talking about how you would consider maybe it was more evangelical. So was this like a charismatic church.

Where the music is for the listeners, Assemblies of God, if anyone knows what that is.

I was in an assembly of God growing up as well.

Oh, then you know exactly what's. Yeah.

Went even deeper with my family after That I was the kid of the parents. So we were in a cult church at one point for four years. The reason I asked that is because I go to, like, sometimes I'll go to the Congregational church in my town, which is very light. And whoever you are on whatever journey you're on, you're welcome here. It's very meditative, I would say. And I'm more like if I want to feel a spirit, I have to go to like a black gospel church or I used to feel something a lot of times music, but like in an evangelical church, it's all about feeling. Feeling almost. Well, there are two questions.

What do you believe in now? Like, for instance, I believe in nature. Like nature makes me feel. What makes you feel something now? The way that you used to feel about God.

In that context of us asking the question, I would say I don't. I think when I die, it'll be just like before I was born. Now the next question I tend to get from the people that I don't enjoy having these conversations with as much, but. Oh, and you get peace in that? No, I don't get peace with that at all. I mean, it is what it is. The idea of the light's going, else you won't know. So I guess there's kind of peace in that sense. You don't choose what you believe in.

You believe what you're convinced of. Back to like Pascal's Wager that we kind of brought up earlier about, you know, it's better to at least believe in case you're wrong. It's like, well, but that doesn't work. You know, I can't come to God with a pure heart because I don't believe he's there. So I would say the answer that a lot of people would be looking for would be nothing. I don't believe in anything in the religious or spiritual context.

I guess the feeling that you used to experience when you were feeling the spirit.

Oh, that's easy. Coldplay concerts. Yeah, I'm not even kidding, you know.

But that's an easy question for you, is just. But only Coldplay concerts alone.

Well, no, I mean, that's just. I don't get. It's weird.

He always starts praying to Coldplay.

Oh, gosh, here's some bucket list stuff. I. I want to do a lot of concerts because I'm concert starved. I've been to one non Christian concert my entire life and it was Coldplay. I had the privilege. My son, we bought him tickets for Christmas for him and a buddy and he ended up taking me and it was just an amazing experience. You know, it was this outdoor stadium concert. And I remember at it, I'm like, wow, this feels really awesome.

You know, like you're in here with all these people in the community and the lights and the this and the music. And Coldplay is actually kind of like modernist church kind of music anyway, you know, with all the reverbs and the, the syncopation with the guitars and stuff. Well, I guess the reason I bring that up is because that is accurate. Now, I, I don't go to concerts to get that vibe, but to an your question, I get that whenever I have those experiences. And what's funny is if you listen to a lot of people that, you know, have deconverted, they say the same thing. They're like, I get the same thing out of just getting together with other people and having similar types of expressions. You know, most of the time it's music. Yeah.

I would just add that I think a lot of, well, my religious society that I have experience with, if someone said, I have a spiritual experience when I'm out on the lake on Sunday instead of coming to church with my family and we're out on the water, it's just us, I don't think anyone would admit to it outside of church. But in church, if you said, well, so and so doesn't come to church because they get a spiritual experience when they're out on the water with their family, there would be, I promise you, and I, I think it be any congregation, but there would be a little bit of like tongue and cheek, like, oh, they're replacing the spirit with something, you know.

Yeah. And I would have too. I would have been very. I condemn the hell out of people, you know, that didn't go to church Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night and Tuesday night prayer meetings, which isn't the point. Your point's not church attendance. But I would have been one of those people. Because if you're lukewarm, I'm going to spit you out of my mouth.

Yeah, that's the scripture right there. And a lot of us who are religious, we will automatically count someone else's experience as counterfeit if it doesn't line up with exactly what we, A, have experienced or even scarier, B, think we should be experiencing. And I can tell you that my, through my crisis of faith, this was a really important key component where we as members of X religion or have X spirituality automatically discount everyone else's experience, their spirituality based on whatever notion we've built up. And so I think this is just a really important key point.

Do you feel like you were tricked by religion?

I'm going to give you two answers, yes and no.

Oh, that was helpful.

What about maybe here's the differentiat. It depends on when you asked me, you know, if you asked me today. No. Now when you ask, when you say do I feel I was tricked by religion? I'm gonna, I'm answering that in the sense of, you know, the people that exposed me to it and the people that mentored me in it. Right when I first deconverted and it wasn't because of people and probably would be a good idea to talk about. Good idea to talk about that in a moment how that went down. But when I first deconverted and then I kind of accepted to myself, like, I think this is a bunch of crap, you know, and respect. I'm not calling anyone's religion out their crap.

I'm just saying that was my, that was my journey and my internal monologue, if you will. And I did get angry because I was like, man, these people, you know, they brought me into this and told me this stuff now. And then it dawned on me, I'm like, I did that too. And I was like, well, hold on. I did it. And I sure would like some grace, mercy and, or forgiveness because I was doing it with pure intention. I genuinely believed it, you know, I genuinely thought I was helping people. So, you know, once I had the self awareness of that, there was some like bitterness or, you know, resentment that was there for a while and that helped me get over it.

And maybe it would have been there no matter what could just sometimes when you go through something, you know, that can happen, even if it's not fair or logical, it just might be emotional, you know, so I was. But I'm not.

Were you mad at yourself for believing for so long? Like, I know that when I've gone through my. I don't know if you've heard my story, but I really stopped my respect for the evangelical faith. Even though I didn't really believe in it anymore, I still believed in the idea that they were good people trying to do the thing that they believed in. And it was when Trump was elected for me not to get into politics, but I was like, wait, they taught me my beliefs and now they don't believe what I believe.

Yeah, but Obama said, no, I'm just.

But that's what it was. I became like a baby in terms of really being confused about morality instead of just Trusting that I know what morality is. I get angry at myself a for not like, thinking harder on it, even though I've thought about this too much over the years. So how did you feel, as you like, about yourself? Were you just relieved? Because I don't feel good about where I'm at right now. I love talking about it, though.

This is a non black and white question, right? Because there's a little bit of some things in there. But I don't feel I was tricked. I will say this. I know how they feel about people like me because I used to be in the club and I know what's said about atheists. I used to say it myself. It's not a brotherly love thing. And I'm not just talking about a church that, you know, I've attended, you know, but that's been my, my anecdotal experience in life. I can't deny the fact that I've got some guard up because even with family, even what's set at Christmas, if I'm not there, I know what's said, right.

And I would say all of these things that I'm discussing, I'm in a pretty good place with them today. I deconverted when I was a. You know, the process started at around probably age 28 for me, and I'm 47 now. I've had plenty of time to like, process those things. So today I'm really good. I have a bit of guard up there. And really all that guard is pretty much every friend you have is a Christian, you know, here in the U.S. you know, like, you know, and all that stuff, you know, I don't have anything against Christianity or anything like that, but I am aware of the stigma of the atheist label.

So am I bitter or anything like that? No. Do I think they're good people? Absolutely.

Do you feel bad about your past self for having stayed so long?

Actually, maybe I did at one point. I couldn't tell you. I remember that. But like, that just doesn't seem like it would be crazy for me to have been like, oh, you know, you stupid idiot. You know, But I don't feel that way. I don't really remember feeling that way before. But I can speak for myself today. It's just, it's kind of like, like if I got.

I love tattoos, you know, if I had a bad tattoo, I've got a couple that aren't all that great. They're still awesome because they're a chapter marker in a journey. Right. You know, I wasn't out I may have hurt some people psychologically, you know, or whatever, with some, some bad teaching or what have you, but I was not hurting people deliberately, for sure. I know I did some good, you know, during those things, and I had a lot of good times and I met a lot of great people. So I absolutely don't feel bad about those things now. I don't have a lot of relationships that I had from back then, but the ones I do, I'm very grateful for, and that's that.

So one of the things I've experienced is having had that background of being in the evangelical faith, knowing too much, because I lived it and I, I really tried hard to believe it and did all the youth group stuff and everything. And then being where I'm at now, I have a lot of relationships that are very, very liberal and a lot of atheist friends or agnostic friends. And then I have very, very conservative evangelical Christian friends. And I feel like I'm trying to always ride a line with that. So I try to be open to everybody and accepting and I also know what I believe or don't believe. And it's hard sometimes. Like, how do you manage?

It can be. That's actually bigger than a religious question for me. I've dealt with a lot of negative mental health issues over the last five years. The last, up until just a handful of months ago, the two and a half years leading up to it were just the last two and a half years of my life. Just period. Nothing else to add to that. Very hopeless, very full of shame, you know, regret. In all of that.

We're not going to dig into those things today, but in all of that, you know, I just had to do a lot of work on myself. One bit of self awareness I gained for me was I really just didn't have much of a foundation for self worth. It's actually one of the reasons I don't do the podcast and the YouTube thing anymore, because it was like a drug. Because when you don't have like self worth and then even though it's a small pond, if you're a big fish in it and you get admiration and pats on the backs and all this stuff and even likes on a, on a post or something can trigger some dopamine that makes you feel good about yourself during these struggles, I realized that that wasn't good for me. And what it brought me to was essentially just doing, you could call it some shadow work if people have been going through that stuff. But just working on myself and who I am addressing Things from my childhood I had to deal with, you know, things I had to push through that kept me as a child even into my 40s, you know, and immature as a child. You know, I'm not trying to be cute or anything in my favor there.

So what I say is I have a 15 year old melody inside of me who likes to control a lot of things and I have to recognize, I mean, I had a therapist once who said, melody, would you ever be mean to a 5 year old? And I'm like, no. Why are you mean to five year old Melody?

There's someone out there that needed to hear that and let that resonate with you when you do so because I had to do the same thing. It's like you had to. I had to heal some wounds that I had suppressed. So in saying all of that, I've gotten to a pretty good place on. I'm getting to, you know, am somewhat, you know, at this good place of accepting myself just as for who I am, including my faults, including all of those bad things, which really helps you get into a place to be able to become who you want because you don't have to become that person. You've accepted yourself and now it makes it easy to kind of flow and get to where you need to be. So with that being said, with friendships, I've learned to rein things in. I used to be out there and spread so thin and I've learned that I've got a handful of really solid friends that are like, you know, my ride or die people.

And then all of the others. I am pretty selective on that small handful. Now, religion's not one of those things because Curt is in my most inner circle. He's a devout religious person. So it's not that they can't be religious, it's just, it's got to be someone that can love me for being non religious and I can love them for being religious and, and we go from there. And then anyone outside of it, I've just put up healthy boundaries and healthy walls, which is something I've never done in my life up until recently. And so now, you know, I can go hang out and I do. I'm not going to, I'm not going to name any events because I don't want people to get, get any ideas.

But I have regular, you know, social things that I go to with people that, you know, I just bite my tongue a lot of the times because they don't like to be respectful the other way around. But I have fun with them. You know, we do good things and so how do I handle it? I've learned to build healthy boundaries and realize that you have different friends for different things. Some friends are, are there because they are a core part of your life and some friends are there because they're just good people and you have a mutual interest and do those things together. And I will also say this, Melody, and I'm not pointing it at you, but definite for myself. And I just want to be clear, I'm not pointing this at anyone else. I used to just be so judgy and I mean, I still have strong opinions on things and stuff, but I used to be just so judgy and condemning. But it's also how I was towards myself as well.

And learning to be kinder to yourself, learning to appreciate a little bit of grace or a lot of grace to appreciate forgiveness. When I was able to do it for me, I was able to do it for others.

That's a great point because as I've done a lot of work myself as well, having compassion for myself, I used to be very hard on myself. And one of my mentors one time, I was six months, she'd been coaching me and she was so nice to me and she coached so many other guys who are like, she's such a hard ass. She's always on me like, why don't you like me enough to be mean to me? She was like, oh no, I don't have to be hard on you. You're already hard enough on yourself. And it never occurred to me like how anybody else wouldn't be exactly like that. It just shifted a lot for me.

And it's something I don't know about you, Melody. I'm curious, but for me it was something, you know, I learned that as a child, I learned my value was being able to, you know, be sacrificed. And my worth was that of if you do good, you get the pat on the head and if you don't, you get the kick in the ass type of thing.

100%, yes. And I was made to be a missionary in the world. Like I was given on the altar to be a missionary. And I've kind of led my life a lot of times in service to others, not thinking of me. And when I do think of me, it's selfish. So having to reset a lot of things that get very confusing because of the way the world is right now.

Too much information from the religious background. One of the things that said often is to find yourself, you lose it. That sort of like Self sacrificial is where all the love is. I think that a lot of us found our meaning in not finding ourselves necessarily because it was. It felt like it was vain.

You were taught it was bad.

Yeah, literally.

So, Bobby, you know, a lot of people believe that atheism is a carte blanche check to just go ahead and give up on morals. I think that a lot of people at church are being physically taught that if you don't have this, you're free to do whatever you want and what kind of life is that? So maybe you could talk to us a little bit about where your morals come from once you're outside of the religious construct.

Here's the thing. I do get to do all the bad things that I want to do. I've raped just as many people as I want to rape. I've killed just as many people I want to kill, and I've robbed just as many people as I want to rob. And all of those numbers are zero. And I've done it. Without divine command theory, I couldn't win a debate on morals. But mine generally work pretty well in the world that we live in.

So, Bobby, one of the things that I think a lot of our listeners may be either wrong about in their own head, or maybe they've been taught it and they're not sure about it. But it's a very confusing thing, I think, for people who find their purpose in an eternal God centered construct, whether it's a spiritual or religious construct. I think people find that atheism is maybe the easy way out or it's a way to. For someone to sort of give themselves this ability to just live their life with no care whatsoever, and that there can't be any happiness in that. But I know from your story of. We've already talked about how deeply religious you were and how embedded you were in the whole, I'll say construct one more time. But really it was like the framework that was around people socially.

Can I add one thing to what Curt said? There's a whole Christian song about it. It says it's harder to believe than not to. And like a lot of people's faith is built on the idea that they are doing something hard by believing and holding on to faith and the world is not made for them and they just have to get to heaven kind of thing.

I don't know if that's true or not, but I can tell you this. My deconstruction process was very long. It was over the course of two years and it was mostly Two years of scratching, fighting and clawing to hold on to my faith. That may prove that comment, right? It may not. I really don't care. It's not a contest. But how did it happen? For me, it started, and I'm going to kid you not. It started with the cancellation of Sunday night services at a church I went to.

I was very devout, not just to my religion, but also to my denomination, because I was. They told me this is the right way, and I was convinced that they were accurate. Right. So I'm on staff at this church and my pastor says that, hey, we're going to cancel Sunday night services. It was just me and him and the. I wasn't the senior pastor of the church. It was just me and him in his office. And I pushed back and I'm like, pastor, we can't do that.

That's not, you know, right. And he's like, well, why not? And that was the answer I gave him was just a dead air because I was like, well, I don't have a biblical foundation for Sunday morning. Sunday night, Wednesday night. Really, I accepted those things for just being how we do it and then applied my total commitment to this thing that I accepted as the case. And, you know, and he gave me a little history lesson, showed me a couple of passages of scripture and I was like, yeah, you're right, that's true. I wasn't going to fight trying to hold on to my dogma because I wanted the truth of the Bible. And that one little thing when I was like, wow, I was wrong. I was so serious about this and didn't have a good reason to be so serious about it.

I'm better off now because I'm now, you know, closer to God. I'm closer to following God's word as it's written. I really need to open my eyes and stop just believing some of these things that we've been taught. And it just sent me on a path. And if you hear this story, most atheists I know in, you know, here in the U.S. you know, in our cultural Christianity, it's pretty much always the same because most people ask the question that you guys asked. This way, you're an atheist. What happened? What horrible thing went wrong in your life?

If I could interject something I recently learned about that I think is really important to follow along with as people are in a religion or spirituality works too. There's called PIMI P I M I that is physically and mentally and. And then I think the part we're at in your story is where you become PI physically in, mentally questioning. So P I, M Q. Because what happens is ultimately it goes P I, M I then it usually moves to P I, M, Q questioning and then physically and mentally out P mo and then usually it goes po mo so physically out, mentally out. Each of those stages can be really hard. But that P I, M O pimo, that's where you're really not being true to yourself. Because I'm physically here, but I don't want to be here.

I think I skipped that one altogether, to be honest with you.

And that doesn't surprise me because of your personality. Like just always want to be really transparent and true to who you are. But there's also another scenario where you are physically out but mentally in. That's a crazy situation to be in, but it happens. My point is, is that I'm sort of following along to where like you grab a thread on something and you go huh, I'm going to dive deeper in that what's going on here? And typically a religious context. And I want to dive into this part with you. A religious context will typically say only look at the information that we give you. If you're going to be searching for God, you have to do it with the materials we've given you and anything else is given of by the devil.

Which is ironic because when you're trying to bring people in, you're asking them to stop looking at the things that they're looking at and ask them to only look at the things that you have. Which is of course something that you're not willing to do it yourself. And a lot of it comes from that sort of PMI thinking is that I'm physically in, I'm mentally in, and I never, I don't need to know what Muslims believe, I don't need to know what a Sikh believes because that would only great on what I already know, which is a really horrible way to build your faith. But yet it's sort of the foundation, I think where a lot of us are on. So I was just wondering if that how any of that might play into your like struggle coming out here was.

The struggle like I started on this path of like I just want to be a more pure Christian. And I realized I needed to challenge the things I believed because I realized I had believed some stuff for the wrong reasons. Allah, church attendance, right. So there was a time where I struggled wanting to believe in God, realizing that I didn't, but couldn't even admit it to myself. But I wasn't like involved at the church at that point. You know, I was. At that point, I was kind of okay with, like, just figuring, you know, know, this stuff out. And I'm going to kind of rush at this point.

We got like five minutes here. But the bottom line is, I realize, you know, truth fears no test. I realized that I had believed some things for bad reasons, and I wanted to authentically approach my religious journey, if you will, with the willingness to be wrong and course correct when I'm shown that I was wrong. Now, here's the other podcast. Well, I'll just say there was a lot of time of realizing, oh, this doesn't actually add up to me. And when I was able to be honest with myself instead of saying, instead of just the magical cure off. Oh, well, with context, it makes sense. Well, I'm glad it does for the people that it does, but it sure as heck doesn't for me or to me.

And I can't fix that. If I'm broken, I'm just broken. If I'm condemned to hell for eternity, it's just because that God that made me has a put a brain in here that didn't allow me to understand what he created. And there's a little tongue in cheek in that, but there's a lot of seriousness in that comment as well. So, long story short, it was probably the first year of it, just talking to a lot of friends, you know, ministers I knew, or just very, you know, knowledgeable, devout Christian friends that I knew. Usually the advice was the same. You got to just pray when you have doubts and you got to read the Word more. You got to get in the Word.

You don't renew your mind daily. Don't be corrupted by the world and yada, yada, yada, which I'm like, I don't listen to secular music, bro. What are you talking about? Like, I only listen to Christian music. I only want to do all this stuff. The deconstruction happened in my head, and it was probably six months from the time that I set it in my head. I was laying in bed one night and I just admitted with a thought, wow, I don't believe in God anymore. It was terrifying. And I can't explain why in the little bit of time we have here, so we'll dig into that later.

But it was six months later before I said it out loud to another person. And it was one of my best friends that I've had from the church way back when. And then it was probably two more months before I said it to My wife. And that was the scariest moment for me because, you know, we had never been in a place where I ever thought, you know, that we weren't ever like in a bad spot. The divorce word was just not really something on the radar. You know, we were very in love and committed and I thought, wow, I'm about to change everything we got. My groomscape was go ye into all the world and preach the gospel.

This is so aligned with Curt's story with Rachel. When he was going through, he talked about the same thing.

Yeah, well, it was terrifying. And I was on the road one day, I can wrap this up and 90 seconds I was on the road. I had to take about a 90 minute trip from the company I was working for and I was the boss. So I was able to let Melissa just ride with me. And I went and picked her up and she just rode with me and the time was right and I started it the worst way possible. We're in the car and I got a little quiet and I go, baby, I've been needing to talk to you about something for a while. I haven't had the nerve to bring it up. I'm just really scared with how you're going to respond.

Of course our mind's thinking, oh my God, he's cheated on me, or, you know, something like that. It was a horrible presentation. But I said, I don't think I believe in God anymore. I waited about two or three seconds and I said, no, I actually know I don't believe in God anymore. And she didn't take it well, like internally. That was a difficult thing for her to hear. But she got quiet for a second and she goes, well, that doesn't change how I feel about you. And then we really didn't talk about it very much for a little bit.

It's easier for me to talk about stuff like that. You know, Melissa is a much less confrontational, you know, when I say she's not like confronting things as much as I may, that was very freeing to be able to tell the person that, you know, you care the most about. And that was. That was from being on staff at a church to telling my wife was two to two and a half years of a lot of torment. You know, it wasn't like deep, dark depression or anything, but a lot of fear. Even after you deconvert, you're so conditioned, you realize you don't believe in God and you're still afraid to burn in hell.

Nelly, that sounds like you.

It does sound like me. That's why I love talking about this, because I'm still open to believing and I think this is like such a great place to. It's like the cliffhanger of and then what happened.

Yeah, because I think the next part of the story, and we do need to wrap it up today. But I think that the next part of the story is going to be very telling for people who either are in faith crisis or couldn't understand someone who is in faith crisis, and certainly for people who can't understand how an atheist is not taking the easy way out. I think that a lot of people are told that if you leave, there's a demon in you or that there's something that is wrong with you. Yet I think that if we were trying to decide who to do business with, we read the reviews, right? And we don't read just reviews from the company that put them out. We want third party review reviews. We want to read reviews for other companies. And it gets back to sort of what I was saying previously is that this isn't easy. And I think that a lot of us have to change the way that we view the world in order to understand the world that we live in.

And in Bobby's case, I think where it's fascinating is that as you guys are already telling from this story that we need to dig more into, when he gets out of the car with Melissa, his world changes. And I think we all are dying to know how. How.

Thank you so much for this part one Bobby. It was so fun to. I know who says fun about this topic, but we do.

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