4.8 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2023
⏱️ 41 minutes
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0:00.0 | I'm Alan Alda and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating. |
0:20.0 | I feel comfortable saying that I'm an atheist. Even though you can't prove there's no God, there's no way to prove a negative, |
0:24.0 | God is conveniently invisible. I don't need to give that particular |
0:30.5 | imaginary creature any more benefit of my doubt than I give, you know, |
0:37.0 | monsters that may or may not be in the closet of my kids room, right? |
0:42.0 | Why do we have a much much higher requirement for this |
0:48.0 | particular imaginary being than we have for other ones that we easily say no no that's not true it was made up that's |
0:56.1 | Washington Post columnist Kate Cohen she's written a thoughtful book called |
1:00.9 | we of little faith why I stopped pretending to believe thoughtful book called We of Little Faith, Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe, and maybe you should too. |
1:07.4 | It's about the difficulty she had in finally admitting to family and friends that she was an atheist. |
1:14.7 | Her goal, she says, isn't to convince believers to become unbelievers, but to convince |
1:19.8 | non-believers like her of the value of being honest and forthright about their non-belief. |
1:27.8 | You know we talk a lot about communication on this |
1:35.0 | and one of the most difficult communications to have is a difficult conversation |
1:37.0 | about coming out and your story is not like most coming out stories is it? No I guess it isn't. For so many years once you |
1:47.3 | realize you weren't a believer you found it hard to tell others that you were an atheist. Why did it take so long? |
1:55.7 | I wanted everyone to like me. |
1:59.0 | And growing up in America, I absolutely got the, I think, probably true impression that atheists or people who didn't believe in God were suspect in some way. |
2:18.0 | Possibly immoral, absolutely alien, and so I wasn't honest with people around me. |
2:32.0 | And that included your family, didn't it? That certainly included my parents, my family that I grew up with. I was raised reform Jewish. We went to synagogue and we had Shabbas dinner every Friday night we lit candles and I was |
2:49.0 | but My sisters and I were all about mitzvah and I would sit in synagogue and pray and sing like everybody else but I never really |
3:01.4 | believed that the person that there was a |
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