Ep. 2 – Leaving Religion

Pronch :
Hi I’m Pronch

Adam :
and I am Adam, and this is Sacred Skepticism, a podcast where we, two friends delve into the depths of spirituality and belief figuring out where we overlap where we share a ton of common ground and when we are far apart as well.

Pronch :
Each Episode unfolds as a unique journey through our evolving perspectives, and we get to see how each other sees the world

Adam :
And this conversation started and then built and built so we encourage you actually to start from the beginning of this season 1 as the episodes build on the conversation that unfolds as we go.

Pronch :
So Take a moment, sit back, relax and explore with us as we uncover the next layer of our shared exploration

Adam :
We love having these conversations, and what makes it even better is knowing that you’re following along with us, So, welcome to Sacred Skepticism

Pronch :
How are you doing?

Adam :
I’m good. How are you doing? It’s been a minute since we chatted last time, and now outside my window there is not snow and the leaves are starting to come in. So I am always in a good mood when spring rolls around, which feels like the most banal thing to be like, oh, how’s the weather? But I really do, I just dislike winters so much, and I love spring and summer so much that I am always in a good mood when it starts to actually be warm and sunny outside. And it was also gray for the last week and today. Yeah, it’s

Pronch :
Been sun’s finally back. Yeah, it’s been rainy forever.

Adam :
Yeah, so I’m feeling good. It’s a nice little beautiful, some spring teasers outside my window with some grass comebacks, some flowers starting to come in and some trees starting to have more than buds. We’re at the proto leaf stage, so Oh,

Pronch :
Here where we are, we’ve actually, we’ve got full fledged leaves

Adam :
On. Oh, nice. Yeah, there’s a big maple from where I’m looking and it gets huge and beautiful, but it’s only just starting to, it’s greening, but it’s only just starting to have the little chutes of the leaves. But in the fall, it’s kind of the main thing in front of the window in this office here. And in the fall it gets so violently bright orange that it actually, the carpet in this room glows orange. It’s so nice, so neat. Fall is beautiful in here too.

Pronch :
My office where I’m right now is in the basement, so I have one of those small basement windows that I get to. Okay. You can see that’s where my

Adam :
Nature is, just river of the outside world,

Pronch :
And it’s mostly my neighbor’s fence that is there a little bit of, I can see that the sun is shining, but I can’t see the sun.

Adam :
Nice.

Pronch :
Yeah. Awesome. And we also just had the Easter holiday season we did and everything like that. What was going on with you over the last month of Easter and everything?

Adam :
Yeah, it’s a busy season for the hub, for the community network of young Christians that I help lead. And so we have our biggest sort of worship service of the year is our Good Friday service. And so we had that and it was the first time we had been back to the location. We had been in this church gym since we started, basically it was the first time we had been back there since the pandemic. So we did have an in-person service last year, but we were still sort of reintegrating ourselves into in-person things. And so it felt very cool this year. It was a return to what we had done and we had a great turnout and the energy of the service and the feedback we got was just really, really positive. And it was a packed house. So that was, yeah, that’s great.

:
It just felt like, yeah, even more than last year, even though last year was in person and last year was great too, but this year felt really the first big Easter where we were like, we’re back. This is what it felt like before 2020. And so it was busy, but it was beautiful. And then we actually had another, it was a busy month. We had another worship night in Kitchener a couple of weeks after that, and that was really great too. We did this, we’re trying this new service where it’s really art-based, so instead of a sermon or a preaching part, we actually do this exercise where we all examine a piece of art and then discuss the implications of it on our heart, on our soul, on what’s going on in our lives. And so it’s kind of this artistic based worship service and we’ve been trying that out and it was really cool. It was beautiful and it was a great way to end April. So that’s what’s been going on over here on the hub side. How about you?

Pronch :
Not a whole heck of a lot. We had some family time over the long weekend and tried to see all of the family. It was actually the first time that we had all of the family get back together since

Adam :
2020. Wow.

Pronch :
So my family’s quite small. My family is only my wife and I and my two kids and then my parents and my sister and her partner. There’s not an extended, my cousins and my aunt and uncle live quite far away. They’re like an eight and a half hour drive. So we only see them once a year if we see them that once a year. But my wife’s family is very large and the last time we were together, we were 18 or 19 and really this year. Yeah. Wow. And this year we were 21 because there’s more people in the, I’ve got two kids and the cousins that were only 12, 13 are now 15, 16. And it’s really, really strange. I remember being at that family gathering as the new boyfriend,

Adam :
As the

Pronch :
New guy forever ago. And now the cousins that are, there were babies that I met there a long time ago. I remember holding this baby. And now that you’re the same age that I was when I came here, you’re the same age, which is really, really strange. And the other thing that I was just actually reminded of when you were talking about your Easter services and how you finally back to normal, not that we fell out or anything like that, but we reconnected because Yeah, that’s right. Of your Easter worship service in 2020. We probably hadn’t spoken in what, three or four years at that point,

Adam :
Other than maybe a random happy birthday or a Facebook message or some kind of random, maybe we’ve shared a meme or something like that. But yeah, that’s right, because when the pandemic started in earnest here in Canada in 2020, in March of 2020, we had basically already prepped our Easter service for that year and then had to completely basically rebuild it. And we were like, well, nothing was in person at all. And so that’s, I think I was the one on the team who would’ve reached out to you and said like, Hey, could you help us do a live stream? So yeah, that was, and your business partner Ash, who I love, you guys were able to basically you saved our ability to still have an Easter service that year, which is something that our community has done for years and years and years and years and years. Yeah, so that’s true. I forgot the Easter service was kind of the way that we reconnected most recently,

Pronch :
And it was a lot of fun. I had done a lot of broadcast, multi-camera broadcast stuff. That’s what I do is media production. But I had done a lot of multi-camera broadcasts, bringing in a remote participant once in a while, but I had never done a completely remote broadcast before. And so I was looking at my phone a couple of weeks ago over the Easter weekend, and I got a memory from years ago, and it was the photo of us passing, passing

Adam :
Equip us social

Pronch :
Distance equipment, social distance passing equipment,

Adam :
Reaching out six feet apart as you drop something. And then I walked up and picked it up. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.

Pronch :
And then front porch, I needed to tell you, you got to plug it in your network and get this up and plug the camera in this way.

Adam :
Everything was like you weren’t in the room with me or anything. Then we had to zoom to set it all up. It feels like yesterday, but it also feels like 10 years ago. It’s wild.

Pronch :
Yeah, A lot has happened since then. But yeah, that was a really interesting and fun event and it was actual something to do. It was so early pandemic. It was so early. That’s right. We were all staying in our houses and everything like that,

Adam :
And everything had paused. You’re right. There was nothing to do at that point.

Pronch :
So that’s just kind of a bit of a bring back there. That’s one of the things that brought us back together over the last couple of years.

Adam :
Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Awesome. So last time as we chatted through, we got a chance really to hear a little more in depth my story the last few years. And we talked about how we both met at these Christian, these United Church summer camps and then both served on staff at them, but then we heard a little more about what happened next for me in terms of being part of that community and then going away and then coming back and rediscovering the things that I had really missed while I had been away from that community. But also kind of discovering the pieces that I thought, wow, we have a lot of room to grow in justice and inclusion. And then that was what formed kind of the vision for the hub. And so we heard a little bit more then about what happened, the broad strokes of my journey and path over the next few years. But we heard from you this really significant for better and worse moments in your journey at that time at camp and with Faith and with Christianity. But what we haven’t really heard yet is then what was next for you. And so I thought it would be good today for me to interview you a little bit more about what came next. We talked about this experience you had being baptized and then having folks try and encourage you to speak in tongues and it be kind of a very weird and maybe not comfortable

Pronch :
Experience,

Adam :
Uncomfortable experience for you. And then that you go into your friend’s house that night and going, what just happened to me? But that’s where we left off with your piece. So I thought what will be good is just to hear a little more about, so what did come next? So even if we just pick up from there, you’ve been baptized that day, this experience has happened, it’s been really positive, but then also this kind of uncomfortable piece happened that really, really throws you off and you go to your friend’s house, you’re like, what was this? What happens next? What happens from there? You had left camp for the night and you had said to the director, I’m going to be back, but I need to leave right now. And they said, okay. So what happened next?

Pronch :
Yeah, so I mean, this was during staff training. So this is the very beginning of the summer. The summer hasn’t even happened yet, and the rest of the summer was pretty good. Like I said in our last episode, I went to my neighbor’s place of work and had a conversation with her and she kind of described different belief systems and a little bit about you went into greater detail on our last episode about what tongues was, but she kind of glossed over it and gave me a little bit of a like, yeah, this is a thing. And some people, but again, still very young and naive. I just kind of was like, my mind was at ease. I was with somebody I trusted and she made me feel like, yeah, no, things are okay. Everything’s fine. So I went back to camp and checked in. The director said, sorry, I had to be gone. I’m back. Okay. And the rest of the summer was fantastic. Loved the rest of the summer. I loved my experiences. Were

Adam :
You a counselor,

Pronch :
Counselor most of the time, yes. So no. Yeah, the entire summer. It was my first summer. Your first summer you’re always just a counselor.

Adam :
Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. So for those who don’t counselor, like at camp is the staff who are basically with the kids on the frontline. So they’re the folks in the cabins and leading the small group activities. And for when you’re going swimming, you’re going canoeing. The counselors are the ones who are paired with the campers, so they’re the front lines of the staff.

Pronch :
And it was a fantastic summer. I loved everything I did. I have lots of great memories from it. One of the things that is a requirement within these camps is that every counselor has to take on a special needs camper as well, at least one week in the summer. And that’s something I was very, very uncomfortable with. And I told them in the interview that I was uncomfortable with that just because of my lack of experience in that field and being able to understand the person that I’m talking to and relating with. And it just made me uncomfortable. And I just was honest about it upfront and they said, well, it is a requirement, you have to do it. So they ended up giving me somebody who was nonverbal but basically able to take care of themselves. I had to help them with a little bit of stuff, but they made it as easy on me as possible just due to my lack of comfort in that field. And

Adam :
You didn’t have experience, you didn’t feel like you maybe were qualified to do this maybe? Yeah,

Pronch :
Exactly. It just made me uncomfortable. I didn’t want to do wrong. I didn’t want to make the person’s life difficult or whatever. I didn’t know what I was doing. But what they ended up doing that week was I was with the special needs person in the morning, and then in the afternoon I was a lifeguard and I traded off. So I was only doing half as much as what they would usually ask them to do. So camp was really accommodating to my comfort levels as well. And all in it was a lot of fun and I have a lot of great memories from it. And I remember the next year when it was time to apply perm staff, unless you’re terrible, generally you’re allowed to come back if you want. So you have to

Adam :
Apply. Once you have the experience, it’s typically a fairly safe bet that you’ll get a rehire. Sometimes they do even automatic rehires, basically.

Pronch :
Yeah. So I didn’t apply because next year was college and I was going off to college next year. And there’s not a lot of income from working at these camps?

Adam :
No, no, no. Especially United Church Camps, they’re very, and they intentionally keep their costs incredibly low so that one of any income level has ability to access. So there some of the cheapest camps to be able to attend as a participant, but also then, yeah, because that if you’re on staff, you are making just above $0 basically to work there for the summer pretty much. Which is also part of the things I find beautiful is because teenagers are giving up, teenagers in 20 somethings, typically the age are giving up the chance to make money because they want to serve kids and give kids a great summer. And they’re doing it for their faith. They’re doing it for the community service of loving kids for a summer. And so what’s great is that it draws in a really great culture, but it is true. Yeah. A lot of folks end up basically ending that season of their life because eventually the realities of tuition, you can’t make $1,500 over your whole summer and then be able to pay for school next year. It’s

Pronch :
Expect to pay for things. And that was the limitation for me. I remember getting, yeah,

Adam :
Me too.

Pronch :
The timing came along to apply, and I didn’t submit the application and I got a call from the director right before the deadline saying, Hey, we haven’t seen your application. And I knew I wasn’t going to be able to go. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to go, just, I knew I couldn’t afford it. I had to get a real job that would pay an hourly rate, blah, blah, blah, to pay for college. I came from a lower middle class income and my parents weren’t going to be paying my way through. So I hadn’t said it out loud, but I had not officially said I wasn’t going to work. So I remember I was actually with my girlfriend, future wife at the time when a call came in from the director asking, Hey, are you going to, and I had to say, no, I can’t afford to.

:
I really can’t afford to. And I remember being very upset. I remember going over and crying in my girlfriend’s lap and being really upset. I really, really loved the camp experience and I loved the freedom. That was one other thing that the summer that I was, I think I said this last time, the summer that I was there on PERM staff, I felt like I had moved out and I had to move back in for grade 12. So it was the first kind of move out and I was like, oh, that was my freedom. And I had this freedom and my memories were so tied to it and I was really, really, really sad that I wasn’t going to be able to go. But then just life took off. Life took off in a normal way. I got a regular job that summer.

Adam :
Where did you work that summer?

Pronch :
I worked for a waste company, a garbage company, but I wasn’t picking up garbage. I was a maintenance guy. So I drove my own car to all the different sites and I had a spreadsheet of sites that I had to hit every so many weeks.

Adam :
That was fun. When you’re a teenager and you get a car for your job, you get to drive for your job.

Pronch :
It was my car. It was my car. They didn’t even give me a car.

Adam :
They got the cool city truck that you get to drive around into the parks and stuff.

Pronch :
No, they paid me mileage. So I got my hourly rate plus mileage, which was more than gas, which in my mind made no sense. I didn’t understand the whole depreciation of your vehicle thing. I also was driving a vehicle that costs like 800 bucks, so there’s no way that there was any depreciation happening on it.

Adam :
Yeah, you can only depreciate to zero and then that’s it.

Pronch :
Yeah. But no, so I got my hourly wage plus some mileage, and my job was to go around. The company I worked for didn’t have big bins that you see. They had these, they looked more like regular garbage cans, but they were prettier. And my job was to clean them up, wash them down, make sure that they looked good, and just kind of general maintenance note if anything was broken. And then the real maintenance crew would come out. My job was just kind of surveying, cleaning and making sure that things looked good for the company. And that was a great job for the summer. Mostly free didn’t, my bosses just wanted me to take pictures and say, this site’s good, this site’s good. And I didn’t get a daily, you must do this, you must do that type of thing. So that was a good summer. And then went off to college and studied media and production, stuff like that, and got married. And when I got married, the minister who performed our wedding was actually a person from my camp life. My wife had been raised in a quite religious household and very, very Christian. And I hadn’t, I was Christian through my camp association, but I didn’t have a church and I didn’t want to get married inside a church. I didn’t have a church. If anything, my church was camp.

Adam :
Yeah, that’s the case for a lot of folks who are part of this community.

Pronch :
So my wife and her mom found a venue and everything like that, beautiful outside venue outside of St. Jacobs. And the person that I knew from my camp days and from the youth event that was going on throughout the year that I had been a part of was actually a minister in St. Jacobs. And I contacted him and said, Hey, I’m getting married. Would you do our wedding? And he needed to check officially. He said, yeah, I got to officially get it signed off by the church, not happening inside the church, so I need to officially get permission. And he did. And it was fantastic. He was great. And there was religious undertones to the ceremony, but it wasn’t like a Catholic wedding where it’s a mass and at the end of the mass, two people happen

Adam :
To be married. Right. Yeah. It wasn’t a church service.

Pronch :
Exactly. My grandma actually came away from our wedding saying she was quite old. She was like 80 something at the time. She said, when I die, that’s the man I want to perform my funeral.

Adam :
Oh wow, beautiful. That’s beautiful. It

Pronch :
Was pretty funny. And actually eight or nine years later when she did eventually pass, I did call him and say, actually, so after my wedding, my grandma said this, and he unfortunately couldn’t make the schedule work and he wasn’t able to do it, but it was just really, really

Adam :
Funny. Yeah, really beautiful.

Pronch :
My grandma, when I die, that’s the man I want to do my funeral. But yeah. And then over the course of, I dunno, the first couple of years of my marriage and my wife and I would going on long drives and on these long drives, we would talk and she had been raised quite religious. And actually to that note, when we were just dating, I’m just going to step back here for a second here. There’s a moment that just came to my mind when we were just dating right after the summer. I had spent at perm staff, actually, it might even have been the year before. It was right after my youth camp when I had had that moment in the small church where I had my come to Jesus moment. I remember that year at school asking her about hearing God. I had read quite a bit of, I can’t say I’ve read the Bible, I cannot say that, but I had read passages and there was certain ones where somebody had heard from God.

:
God had said something to them. And I remember being like, that’s not my experience. I’m not hearing anything. So I remember going to my wife and saying, this is a thing, hearing God, do you hear God? And she looked at me absolutely stump outed going, yes, all the time. How do you not? She was actually concerned that I had not been hearing God and thought that that was strange. I dunno if that’s the right thing to say that she thought it was strange, but I remember her attitude being very much like, yes, absolutely. It was surprising to her. And I’m surprised that you do not. And so that’s like, okay, that’s a learning moment for me. And this is, again, this is high school. So then fast forward a couple years, all the stuff I just told you on these long drives, we would talk about life and things that we were observing and just how things seemed to not be good in general.

:
Humanity has good elements, but there’s a lot of things in the world not being good. Yeah. There’s things in the world that are bad, people dying unexpectedly, people being hurricanes, destroying whole neighborhoods. And I don’t even remember all the subjects. I just remember in general, we were talking about life and God and why and this. And there wasn’t ever a specific moment where I would say I realized I was an atheist. It just kind of slowly became a thing that I just didn’t believe in and more, actually, I remember this one moment when my sister invited her Jewish friend to Christmas. I was hosting and she asked, Hey, could this person come to Christmas, Jewish? And her family’s not doing it, her family doesn’t live here, or something like that. And I remember looking at my sister confused at this time, I’m still kind of Christian, not Christian. Yes, Christian. But I remember thinking, she’s Jewish. Didn’t the Jews kill Jesus? Wow. Yeah. Why would she want to come to a Christmas celebration?

Adam :
You internalized some rough stuff there, some antisemitic stuff. Yeah.

Pronch :
Well, and it’s not that I didn’t want her, I’m not antisemitic,

Adam :
I just remember. No, but it is important to note as we’re talking about, so you’ve just talked about the what’s called the odyssy question, which is how can there be a good God in the presence of evil in the world? Yes. But also when we talked last time in terms of about startup things, that started to become more visible to me. What were the inherent, the toxic problems within many Christian cultures and that our community was no exception. And justice and inclusion and anti-racism needing to be confronted and talked about in order to grow in those areas is something that I identified as needing to be part of our community. And so again, just to say that it is very, very insidious the way people don’t even realize that things like antisemitism are hidden beneath what appears to be just very straightforward. Like, oh, here’s the story, and these are my religious beliefs, but in colonial context that we live in and in white Christianity in the west, antisemitism really insidiously runs below the surface of so much.

:
And so it is really important to catch that you have this moment because it exposes for us what lives in many of us and me included growing up in those cultures, that we have to be so aware to confront, in this case, antisemitism that exist in these faith cultures that we would again say, I don’t think like that. And I never even thought about that. That’s just part of the story. But the way that these stories in oppressive, what we would call a colonial contexts, have been handed down to us, ingrained in them, have these toxic evil elements within them. And they all of a sudden come out in these moments where people, and I’ve had many Jewish friends who, especially around Easter, it’s a very difficult time because so many people internalize antisemitic messages around the Easter story in white Western, particularly white western Christianity.

:
And yeah, we are, no, just because we’re Canadian and we’re not south of the border, sometimes we characterize that it’s Americans who internalize all this bad stuff in religion, but we are absolutely subject to it too. And we are absolutely in Canada. We do perpetuate it in our faith cultures. And even in United Church of Canada cultures, which again prides itself on being very, very liberal and very committed to growing in anti-racism, we are no exception to toxic antisemitism lying in the fabric of our faith traditions, and it’s something we have to confront. So I just thought that it’s an important thing to name as you bring it up. Yeah.

Pronch :
Well, yeah, no, and I remember having that thought of why would a Jewish person want to come to a Christmas ceremony when

Adam :
Again,

Pronch :
In the story in my brain, the Jews killed Christ, so why would she want? But again, not fully making the connections. Yeah.

Adam :
Again, you’re young and you had this one kind of bubbled experience, and so when it’s the water that you swam in, you don’t even, again, that’s the thing for me, it took walking, it took being away from the community to come back and really start to see some of these things and have really be led by friends, whether they were to be led by friends who helped me to see these things. Because when we’re part of these cultures and these communities, it is something that we do not notice. It’s completely normalized. It

Pronch :
Becomes normal because everybody’s a part of it. Everybody’s got the same thought process.

Adam :
Exactly. Yeah.

Pronch :
And so yeah, those are a couple of moments sprinkled in of basically just slowly, gradually looking at the world and not seeing what the Bible professes, what Christianity professes in the world, but then learning more about evolution, learning more about how humans became the way that we are and the way that we interact, and just seeing how random the universe seems to be that it just became less and less of a belief. And I think that my wife probably would’ve called herself a non-believer sooner than I did, even though I was the one that came from the non-religious household, my camp experience, being baptized, all that stuff. I wouldn’t have professed being a Christian, but I probably would’ve said I was more deistic if you had asked me at the time

Adam :
Me more about that. When you say deistic, what would that have meant to you at that time? Yeah,

Pronch :
So at the time, I remember the term being agnostic to the idea of like, yeah, there’s something there. Don’t know what it is, but there’s something there. That probably would’ve been my description. Gotcha. Yeah. And it was about maybe three years ago that I started listening to a lot of podcasts, and that’s what actually made me want to do this podcast because our relationship and everything like that. But it was about maybe three years ago that I started listening to a financial podcast. The reason I found this podcast was it was financially based, and I was not looking for a religious podcast. I don’t even remember what show I was listening to that this person was on, that he was describing, Hey, this is what I do. I’m a financial advisor, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’ll plug the show. It’s the Phil Ferguson show.

:
And again, I went there looking for financial, how to invest in the stock market, how to prepare for retirement, that type of stuff. And the show was maybe 30% finances, and the other 70% was atheism, which is like what a combination of show. So he would always start off with investing. Skeptically was his term. And he’s got over 400 some odd shows, and I still listen to him today. So plug for the Phil Ferguson show. And I learned so much about investing from that. I feel really confident and I understand more about how the market works and what to do and everything. But then I also was listening to interviews with people in the skeptic community, people in the atheism community, and people who are very critical of religion. And it was just kind of background noise for me. I was listening to this show as I was doing other tasks, and then I finished his show.

:
I listened to all 400 episodes and I was caught up to week to week, and I hate that I never being caught up with a show. So I started listening to another show called Dogma Debate, and that’s got David c Smalley is the host of that show, and it’s now called the David c Smalley Show. So again, plug for that one. And that really was why I now call myself an atheist and why I use the term outwardly, I know that in America it’s a lot worse than it’s in Canada, but in certain areas of America, the word atheist is like you’re a devil worshiper and you eat babies. Is

Adam :
That something? Sure, those cultures exist that people are very, very hostile

Pronch :
And they don’t know what the term atheist means and fact because

Adam :
They’re coming from their own bubble. But people have told them that’s who those people are. Right.

Pronch :
And to ye that may not know all that atheism means is’ the answer to one question, do you believe in any of the gods proposed? And the answer for me is no. And that’s all it means. There’s no rituals, there’s no beliefs beyond that. There’s no meetings. There’s skeptical communities, there’s humanist communities, but atheism and being an atheist is just the answer to one question.

Adam :
So for you, it’s not a practice, it’s not a practical way of engaging with the world.

Pronch :
It does inform how I work through the world and how I see my life and how I see the importance of life in general. But one of the things that I want to give a quote here for one of the previous hosts of dogma debate, I heard this and I thought, wow, this is great. And I can’t actually remember the name of the host and I should find it, but he said, skepticism is my nature. Free thought is my methodology. Agnosticism is my conclusion. Atheism is my opinion. Humanism is my motivation. And I loved that. I absolutely loved that. The idea that I am skeptical by nature, I’m going to look at the world and try to understand how it works. Yeah, that’s definitely who I am. And I want to know more about why the universe is and how the earth came to be, the cloud of dust that expand, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and free thought.

:
It kind of goes in line with that, just the idea of thinking it through and figuring it out. Agnosticism, I would completely agree that I’m an agnostic atheist. I do not know definitively that there is nothing out there. I do not know that. But the religions that have been proposed by humanity to this point, I don’t generally find that there’s enough evidence to support them. I don’t think that it’s believable to me. Everybody’s got their own personal experiences. Obviously they have their relationships that I believe is with their own selves and their internal internal thought processes and everything and working things through and whatnot. But to me, that’s what it looks like. It doesn’t look like there is a God to direct or to have a relationship with. And then humanism being, how’s that go there? Humanism being my motivation, motivation for advancing humanity and thinking about how can we make humanity better? Working together partnerships, raising our children to be skeptical, to be free thinkers, to push the envelope to find what’s out there and working together and being a team. And I got that from the show Dogma Debate now called the DC Smalley Show, and that’s brought me to where I am now and why I wanted to have this conversation with you and to have my thoughts out there and to just kind of be able to talk through beliefs, talk through your beliefs, my beliefs, why we believe what we believe and everything. And yeah, that’s how I got to where I am now.

Adam :
Nice. Okay. Say that just because that’s then a perfect segue. Can you say that Maxim one more time of the Yeah, yeah. I want to do a checklist in my own head for a second. Yeah,

Pronch :
Absolutely. So skepticism is my nature. Free thought is my methodology. Agnosticism is my conclusion. Atheism is my opinion. Humanism is my motivation.

Adam :
Agnosticism is my

Pronch :
Conclusion.

Adam :
Conclusion. Atheism is

Pronch :
My I that I do not know. That’s my conclusion. I do not know atheism is my opinion. I believe that there is nothing.

Adam :
Gotcha. Yeah, I just wanted, yeah. Okay.

Pronch :
Jerry Dewitt is the person who came up that I just did a quick Google there, Jerry dewitt. I

Adam :
Love New Host. It’s a great, it’s just a great kind maxim of going, this is where I’m at. So yeah. So I find it super interesting as you go through that. One of the things that we talked about, even last episode and that we’ve talked about just together off the mic as well, is that we really have similar, in many ways, we have so many similar beliefs and a general posture towards life and people, even though we would definitely identify difference in the theology or where we end up landing on God and the universe and all that, and I just thought that really what you just read and saying that’s something you really identify with, and that’s been very powerful to you. It reinforces that to me because as you went through, so skepticism is my nature. I would without getting words, fail us eventually. So without going too deeply into thinking, I boil myself down to this. I would say by nature, I am a highly skeptical person.

:
And so that has always been a very large part. Sometimes living in tension with my faith, but also I would say more often than not actually drives how I grow or interpret my faith and practice my faith. So skepticism is my nature. I check that box going, I definitely can get down with that. Free thought is my methodology. Again, I wouldn’t want to boil it down to only one thing, but again, maxims aren’t intended to do that. They’re intended to just be brevity, but absolutely free thought is my methodology. One of the key pieces of how that connects back to my faith is I think that the first and one of the greatest gifts that we receive from the divine is free will. And that obviously then follows with free thought and the ability for us to have agency in our lives and in the world.

:
I’m going to skip over a couple for a second. Humanism is my motivation. That is not only for me, would I say that I get down with that, but I would say to a large degree, a large chunk of what I believe and what I see in the person of Jesus would get down with that would be absolutely that. Again, not trying to boil it down too much, but the beauty of humanism and of saying, how can we seek the collective flourishing and liberation of the other of the people around us and of people as a whole? Yeah, I check that box too, and definitely some Christians would try and disagree with this, but I really feel convicted like Jesus would absolutely be on board with that. Jesus is absolutely on board with that and that, and that’s part of why I am so compelled by the Jesus story.

:
So atheism is my opinion. Sure. That would be the one area of diversity where I’d go, yeah, that’s a difference for where our opinions lie. But one of the most interesting ones that I want to bring up there is with agnosticism is my conclusion is a writer and theologian thinker, speaker that I really, really like. His name is Peter Rollins, and another one is another Peter. His name is Peter nss, and they both, they’re these two folks working with primarily interpreting the Christian faith. Peter Ends comes from a real academic and scholarship side, and he’s kind of this guy who, he’s sort of like the twerp in the American Christian community who’s always pointing out why scripture isn’t what people think it is. So he’s the guy pointing out, yeah, there probably weren’t, we have no evidence that there was a population of Jewish folks in Egypt at the time building the pyramids.

:
There is no evidence that we don’t have firm evidence of King David as it is told in the Jewish scriptures. And there probably was a King David, but there’s probably amalgamation stuff happened there. So he’s the guy basically bursting people’s bubbles on all their favorite stories as a kid. But he does still, you would probably identify, he does still approach it from a Christian context and just he would be one to report that what scripture is doing is much deeper and more complex than what is usually presented to people, especially in evangelical and western contexts. So yeah, he’s the tour who kind of bursts the bubble, and Peter Rollins really works with doubt and kind of turning belief systems upside down to kind shake them out and see what’s actually going on inside. So another way he sort of comes at it from more of a philosophical way, but both of them, they’ve really helped me dive into the ambiguity and the tension and the paradox of belief and of doubt.

:
And both of them would say, I would think, and if Peter Rollins ever hears this, and I’m misspeaking and Peter s ever hears this, I’m misspeaking apologies that I didn’t really understand what you were saying. But what I’ve taken away from them is really the Peter Rollins actually has a book called The Sin of Certainty, and that the more we, more particularly, he talks in Christian context, but people of faith or any people clinging to trying to ascertain certainty, the worst things get, or rather the further away we’re actually getting from grasping something that is fruitful and helpful. And Peter Rollins working with doubt really moves on that line too. So the idea of agnosticism is my conclusion, Peter, I’ve heard like Peter Rollins say in effect in a way, as people of faith, we’re all agnostics because we in fact do not claim certainty. And I know there’s broad strokes.

:
Some people would say, yes, I do. But that the whole idea of having faith and in the argument that it is important and healthy not to chase certainty that in a lot of ways that makes us all agnostics too. Or we’d say, I believe in God. I would say for myself, I’ll stop speaking for other people now. And I am convicted and I believe deeply in this story of this dark skinned revolutionary who lived under an empirical power and occupied what’s now present day Palestine and was executed by the state as a revolutionary. And I believe that that person was God and that he was resurrected, that he died and was resurrected. So I believe these things, I feel deeply convicted of those things, but if someone asked me, am I certain of those things, I guess my pithy answer would be like, that’s not a helpful question.

:
So Peter Rollins would say in so many ways as Christians, he would say, I think he would say healthy practicing Christians would be agnostics too, because we are claiming faith, not certainty. So I just say that just as a fun way to kind of reinforce what we’ve talked about offline a little bit, which is of that maxim that you just read, almost all of them in some shape or form while still honoring, especially around atheism, is my opinion. We would absolutely have diversity there, but we would have so much, so much in common. And for me, so many of those things in my personal faith experience, and this wouldn’t be the case for everyone, but in my personal faith experience and my convictions, almost everything you named there are incredibly important drivers of what makes me a person of faith or how I identify as a disciple of Jesus or as a Christian.

:
And so we’ve talked about how the last thing that the world needs is another lame debate. So I think what I’m really excited about with these conversations is how we actually find, we hear each other’s difference and not trying to erase it, but also how we just find so much of that common ground and the ways that we share so much, even though we’ve kind of, as things shake out, we’ve come out with different perspectives. And so that Maxim Red was just a really great way to kind of highlight that and intro that kind of culture that we wanted to create in these conversations between each other.

Pronch :
And I mean, I dunno if this is the right point to do this, but I’m a bit of a sucker for the cliffhanger. So I don’t like watching a show that has a cliffhanger, but there’s a whole reason to do it. There’s a reason to do it. It makes you want to come back.

Adam :
There’s a reason all summer after the first who shot Mr. Burns that we were all like, it was Smithers, it was Snake, it was apu. That was my first memory of a big cliffhanger as a child.

Pronch :
You know what mine was? Mine was Star Wars episode six when Han Solo was in Carbonite

Adam :
Five. Yeah, empire Strikes back at the end of five. Yeah,

Pronch :
Sorry, sorry, my apologies. Yes, five Empire. Oh my goodness. I am going to get a massive overhaul.

Adam :
Yeah, if we get big, we’re going to have enough people, they’ll have much more problem with what you just said than any of what we said about faith or

Pronch :
The religion. My bad. So yes, episode, episode five, when he was locked in Carbonite and it went to credits, and I was like eight when I watched this. Maybe I was 10. And I remember looking at my stepdad going, how is that the end of the movie? How is that the end of the movie? And I’d probably seen Cliffhangers before, but it never, I needed to know what was going to happen next. And this is mid nineties, so the next night we put in the next VHS and

Adam :
We watched it. Yeah, you were watching it live. Yeah, that’s right. For Gen Z. That was probably Infinity War. That was probably their version of that, of being like, that can’t be the end. I can’t wait until next year. But yeah, with us as kids who grew up in the nineties, luckily we had the blessing and the privilege of popping and return to the Jedi immediately.

Pronch :
Yes. But I do remember the who shot Mr. Burns in that eight week summer. I do remember that being like, what? I do remember that. But anyways, the cliffhanger that I would maybe put this on is you’ve described your belief of this Palestine who was executed, but blah, everything you just laid out there, I don’t want to repeat it because the audience doesn’t need to hear me. Say it again. I personally am not convinced that the person Jesus Christ was even a person. I’m not even convinced that that person lived was. And if they were, I obviously have thoughts about what the story actually is, but without having done reading, I want to put that out there. I am not a well-read person on this subject. Just from what I’ve been hearing, what I’ve been listening to through podcasts, I’m not convinced that there actually was a person that was described in Mark, Luke, John, all the different, yeah. What’s the name of those? The, yeah, the gospels. But there’s a specific to them, this narrative.

Adam :
So yeah, so not John. So Mark, Matthew and Luke are the synoptic gospels.

Pronch :
Synoptic gospels. John,

Adam :
He’s kind of the jazz guy. He’s the artist guy who is a little more creative in the telling the story. But Mark, Luke, and John are the ones, synoptic gospels would be the books, the letters that were written in what we now say, the books of the Bible that chronicle the life, death, and resurrection story of Jesus of

Pronch :
Nazareth. Yeah, exactly. So thank you. Synoptic was the word I was looking for there. So yeah, so when you look at the historical nature of the synoptic gospels and what we do know about them, what we do know about the writers is practically none. We don’t know who specifically wrote them. We know it’s not a guy named Matthew, mark, Luke. We know that. And it was told down, there’s a bit of a game of telephone. There’s the cadence, or not the cadence, I can’t remember the word for that now, but the stories were told verbally long before they were actually written down. There was many, many, many years between the stories’ death of Jesus and the actual scripts being written. That’s

Adam :
Correct.

Pronch :
So it’s all those things put together that make me go, I don’t know. I don’t know. Yeah.

Adam :
Yeah. I won’t tease too much more. I think we reached a good point here, but what I will tease is at one of the camps that I continue to lead, we actually have this interactive session where we walk through history and we confront that exact question that you had of how can you trust these? How do we as Christians, why do we trust these texts? Well, when acknowledging that yes, they were not, it wasn’t like the guy was executed and then rose three days later and they wrote it down and it’s stamped and they’re holding up a newspaper of that day or whatever.

Pronch :
A good

Adam :
Metaphor. Yeah, exactly. There was a lot of time, there were years in between. So we actually do a session with kids where we confront that question and we go, okay, what do we do with this? So maybe that will come up in a future episode. I

Pronch :
Would love for you to walk me through that. That would be relief. That’d

Adam :
Be fun. Yeah, it’ll be interesting to do. We literally do it where we draw, draw a timeline of the last 2000 years in chalk, and the kids walk through the timeline all the way up to the cross. So I’ll have to figure out a good way to do it in audio format. But yeah, maybe we’ll do that soon and fun. And we’ll talk about fun. Yeah. How do we confront that question? It is an incredibly important question that everyone should wrestle with, whether, if you’re confronting these beliefs about Jesus, it is not good to ignore that question. So yeah.

Pronch :
Yeah. Alright, let’s leave it there and we’ll pick it up. We’ll pick it up next time.

Adam :
That sounds good. Well, this was great. I was glad that we got a chance now to hear with kind of these next pieces for you. And yeah, next episode we’ll start diving in a little more to some of now the questions that are driving us because heard the stories of the journeys of how we ended up to the beliefs that we’re at, and now we’ll hear some of the things that underpin those beliefs in our next episode. So love it. Well, thanks chatting, Andra, and for those who are listening, thanks for tuning in.

Pronch :
Talk to you next time. Bye.