What’s up skeptics, Thom-Ass Westbrook here.
Ah ha ha!
Ah.
That’s hot!
Before I dive into this video, I’m going to give away 1 2 3 4 – Uh, about 42 of so
of these Holy Koolaid magnetic bumper stickers.
To find out how to get yours absolutely free, smash that like button and watch to the end
of this video.
In my last video, I shared the extent of my religious upbringing as a missionary kid,
youth pastor, worship leader, and missionary, and many of you asked me about my journey,
and how anyone who was in it THAT deep could reject so heavily ingrained in them.
So this is my story of what I guess you could say an atheist’s version of “redemption”
looks like.
Bear in mind, when you’re in it as deeply as I was, there usually isn’t one “aha”
moment.
Reshaping your entire worldview takes massive time and effort.
It’s more like a bunch of “OH My’s”.
George Takei “Oh My.”
6 millennia back, in just 6 days – that’s the time and length of creation I was sold
as a kid.
I was taught that scientists lie about the age of the earth and lie about evolution because
they’re pawns of Satan who just want to live an accountability-free life of sin.
That same tall-tale was fed to most of the kids in our missionary community, so we didn’t
really have any dissenters.
It just seemed normal.
The first person whose opinion I respected who openly didn’t buy that was my high school
youth pastor - an old-earth creationist who believed that Genesis was allegorical and
evolution was God’s method of diversity-building on earth.
He warned that I would discover the overwhelming evidence for evolution in college, and urged
me not to chuck the baby with the bathwater - I didn’t even think there was bathwater.
I thought it was all just delicious baby.
After high school, I visited California.
At an emotionally-charged revival meeting there, a speaker was giving prophetic messages.
Turning my direction, he began prophesying over me, and his words really hit home.
How could he know me so well?!
I’d never talked to him in my life.
Was the God of the universe speaking through this dude?
I wanted it to be real so badly buying it hook line and sinker, and even snagged a copy
of the night’s meeting on CD to revisit later.
The next summer, I worked at a church camp.
When my co-counselor Max shared his testimony with me, he relayed how he’d spent the last
year trying to disprove the Bible.
That seemed super counter-intuitive to me, since I’d always been told not to doubt,
but he explained that truth withstands scrutiny, so we should be able to scrutinize the Bible,
and if it’s true, scrutiny wouldn’t change that, and if it’s not, we shouldn’t blindly
stumble after a lie.
Now he was convinced it was true, but for me, hearing a Christian say it was ok to explore
our doubts was a big deal, and it made me a little less hesitant to peek behind God’s curtain.
Heading off to college, I still interpreted the Bible literally, but the more I learned
about biology, the harder it was to ignore.
I learned that we share genetic code with every animal on earth, and are more similar
genetically to apes than to potatoes – (unless you’re pastor John Hagee).
With an open mind, I explored the claims of young earth creationists, and one by one found
they didn’t withstand scrutiny.
For example, I had been told that DNA information can only be lost or modified and no new genetic
information can be acquired by an organism, and then I learned about horizontal gene transfer
and gene duplication.
Were the creationist lying or ignorant?
I was taught that scientists couldn’t explain fish fossils on mountain tops, and they must
have gotten there from Noah’s flood.
Then I learned how tectonic plates, submerged beneath the ocean floor, can collide and subduction
can push one plate up to form a mountain range.
That’s how earthquakes happen and why Everest is still growing.
Creationist scientists claimed that we can’t measure the age of the earth because carbon
14 dating isn’t reliable.
But then I learned from a paleontologist that that’s why they don’t use Carbon dating
for anything older than about 50,000 years old, and that they have much more reliable
methods for older samples like Potassium-Argon, Uranium-Lead, or many other radiometric dating methods.
My highschool creation-science textbooks taught me that all genetic mutations are harmful
or benign and never beneficial, but then I learned about positive mutations for denser
bones, malaria resistance, cold tolerance, higher lung capacity, super-strength, hyper-flexibility,
better memories, and so much more.
I had been taught that animals could have genetic variation within species, but would
always remain the same species.
Then I learned about ring species that shared a common ancestor but diverged enough genetically
to where they could no longer reproduce with each other.
I was told that vestigial organs were a myth, and that we were masterfully designed, and
every organ has a purpose.
Then I learned about whales still having the remnants of leg bones.
As well as multiple vestigial traits in humans and other animals.
Were creationist “experts” liars, or just completely clueless to basic science - making
them “not experts?”
In some cases, I found that they were either straight up dishonest or extremely lazy in
their research.
Like, when Dr. Steve Austin and the Creation Research Institute attempted to discredit
radiometric dating by showing that measuring a newly formed rock sample from the Mount
St. Helens volcanic eruption yielded 5 conflicting dates.
However, the creationists knew they were using the wrong equipment to date the rock sample,
their equipment wasn’t advanced enough to accurately date rocks younger than 2 million
years old.
Leftover argon residue from previous dating analysis could contaminate the equipment,
causing “memory effects” and yielding an inaccurate result.
And it gets even worse.
Rocks formed in eruptions like this can contain older contaminants called xenoliths which
incorporate into the melted rock and can throw off the dating result.
The creationist researchers knew this, but ignored scientific standards and made zero
effort to separate out these contaminants - making their dating of such an impure sample
a pointless exercise in futility.
But that didn’t stop them from triumphantly touting their earth-shattering findings about
how science is wrong and untrustworthy and we must look to the Bible instead.
A book whose genealogies don’t even match up.
In college, my roommate got be hooked on Ted Talks, and I started reading science books
and watching science documentaries out of sheer curiosity.
I stumbled across a few atheist YouTube videos, and at first I was simply intrigued.
Wanting to strengthen my position as a Christian, I watched click-baty videos like “The top
10 Creationist Arguments” by The Thinking Atheist and the series “Why do people laugh
at creationists” by Thunderf00t.
I genuinely wanted to know if my armor just had holes, or if I was a clothing-free emperor
going full commando.
And that’s when it started getting breezy.
I watched many of the arguments I had been bottle-fed dissipate without substance at
the slightest critical inquiry.
The Bible clearly wasn’t a science textbook and got almost everything wrong in that arena,
but I still thought it was God’s word.
God still seemed like the most plausible explanation for the origin of life and the universe to
me, and I believed the Bible was an internally consistent grand narrative about our need
for salvation and God’s deliverance of us.
So I threw myself back into my faith, becoming a missionary to Central Asia.
On the mission field, in addition to soaking up my Bible, Christian music, online sermons,
and devotionals, I was still binging Ted Talks and science videos and learned more about
abiogenesis, evolution, and the formation of stars and galaxies, and how we observe
all these steps happening naturally on their own.
For example, all it takes for stars to form is matter, gravity, and time.
Gravity pulls clouds of hydrogen gas together, and over time the increased pressure causes
extreme heat.
It ignites so hot that the hydrogen atoms fuse together into more complex heavier elements.
And when the star burns out, it collapses and explodes its contents out which make up
asteroid belts, moons, and accrete to make planets and life.
We observe every step of this process and even know exactly what elements gas nebulas,
stars, and planets are made of using instruments like spectrographs.
I wasn’t just spoon-fed a hypothesis, I learned exactly how we know what we know.
And my Story of Life series covers exactly that.
Gaps in my understanding - previously plugged by god - were filled with sensical, evidence-based
alternatives, and I was conflicted.
I genuinely didn’t want to leave my religion.
I loved the community.
And my whole world view had required the Bible to make sense.
I didn’t know how to find meaning outside of it yet.
I was unaware of any secular community, and my pastors had stigmatized atheists so heavily,
that the thought of becoming one was unthinkable.
So when best friend came out to me as agnostic, I freaked and tried so hard to convert him back,
because I still believed in Hell, and didn’t want him to go there.
But him leaving his faith and coming out to me, helped normalize it a bit.
You know I mentioned my prophetic destiny - spoken by the California prophet?
Well, I went back and listened to it years later.
And there was nothing special in it.
He claimed he saw great changes in my life, as though I was standing before three doors.
But I was 17.
I had just graduated high school and was contemplating college, the mission field, the military,
and other options.
The plethora of choices that hits you at that age is ubiquitous.
He foresaw great things in my life, like I was going to be a strong warrior for God.
I wanted that to be true so I latched onto it.
But honestly, in retrospect, I’ve deconverted way more people than I ever “saved.”
But I can see now, how in my emotional state, with the music, and the attention, how I would
connect the dots and try to make the reading fit my life.
Like ya do.
After my mission trip I started watching more atheist content: DarkMatter2525 helped me
see a lot of my positions from a new light.
Jaclyn Glen and Christina Rad helped me overcome the stigma in my mind that all atheists were
angry, ugly, devil worshipers.
And James Randi’s documentary The Secrets of Psychics.
Led me to be very skeptical of the paranormal.
And then I started exploring the internal consistency of the Bible.
I’d always been told that despite having many different authors, there were no contradictions
in the entire thing.
But I had never actually read it cover to cover up until that point.
I watched Non-Stamp collector’s video on Biblical Contradictions and it piqued my curiosity.
I went so far as to purchase Self Contradictions in the Bible by William Henry Burr and The
Age of Reason by Thomas Paine.
And then started reading the Bible itself, beginning in the beginning (cause it’s a
really good place to start) and then plowing cover to cover.
I’d skipped large chunks of the Bible as a kid, but was still intimately familiar with
most it.
Ya can’t have over 20 years of sermons every Sunday, devotions every morning, and memorize
giant chunks of it without learning the Bible pretty well.
Or at least knowing the parts people tend to focus on in church and Bible studies and
stuff.
But reading it like this was different.
I was open minded and was actually looking for contradictions, errors, and what-not.
And I was taking detailed notes.
I couldn’t even make it through Deuteronomy, before I’d filled pages and pages with problems.
So I searched for the top Christian apologists to see how they were handling stuff like this.
Ravi Zacharias seemed oblivious to most of these issues – like he had his head buried
so deep in the sand he couldn’t smell that his pants were on fire (I guess all it takes
is a spark of critical thinking when you’re talking out of your butt and spouting pure flatulence).
But he had some clever stories, and it was enough to make the average Christian feel
good - or at least smug.
I liked religious scientists like Francis Collins and the man seems genuine and honest,
but he offered no reason for why we should believe in the God of the Bible other than
that he had no explanation for altruism without a God-given conscience.
But I had read the Selfish Gene and just because Francis Collins didn’t know of any reasonable
explanation, didn’t mean there wasn’t one.
William Lane Craig’s was a good debater, and he had logic down, but he had no evidence
that his premises were correct.
And he got creamed in his debate against Hitchens.
Now there are a million other points on this journey, and I’ve shared in past videos
about my experience with sleep paralysis – thinking it was demons before I understood the phenomenon.
I’ve talked vaguely about my experience with faith healing.
And if you guys want see it, I can do a video about a vision that I had and my experience there.
So give this video a thumbs up and let me know if the comments if you want to see that.
But for now, I want to cover two more highlights in my deconversion process.
When Answer’s in Genesis’ president Ken Ham debated Bill Nye the science guy, almost
five years ago, I still viewed Ken Ham as a legitimate, honest science-based Christian.
But during that debate, an audience member asked what it would take to change Bill or
Ken’s minds.
“What, if anything, would ever change your mind?”
Nye responded that one piece of evidence was all he needed.
“We would just need one piece of evidence.”
But Ham showed his true colors
”No one is ever going to convince me that the word of God is not true.”
He said it as if closed-mindedness was a badge of honor.
What a disgusting joke.
I felt insulted and violated that for decades I had been told that scientists were closed
minded liars, and creationist were following the evidence.
At that moment, I was out.
I stood up from my desk and literally blurted, “I’m done.”
Bill Nye took a lot of flak for that debate, and people told him he was giving legitimacy
to huckster Ham.
But I disagreed.
Myself and many other Christians already saw Ham as legitimate, and this debate exposed him.
Years later, I had the privilege of meeting Tracey Moody who submitted that question.
And it was awesome being able to thank her in person.
I would put a pic of the two of us together.
But the pic I took was blurry with a crappy lighting and angle, and she hates that picture,
so Tracy, next time we see each other, we’ll have to get a better one.
I also got to have dinner with Bill Nye at CSIcon, and it was great being able to tell
him that story and thank him in person too.
By the end of that debate, I was no longer a Christian.
I didn’t really believe in God, but the fear of hell, was still super heavily ingrained in me.
So I started wrestling with Pascal’s wager – what if I’m wrong?
And I’ve done a whole video on that as well, as how I overcame the fear of hell.
But a key part of it was a video by 43Alley about how hell is obviously man-made.
How the Jewish people don’t even believe in an eternal hell – and that’s where
Christianity evolved from.
And by the end of his video, I was comfortable being an atheist.
The fear was gone.
Since then, I began seeing how much harm religion can do, and I faced a lot of blowback from
family.
I also started exploring the neuroscience of belief, cognitive biases, and self-delusion.
And I highly recommend the You Are Not so Smart podcast by David McCraney exploring
these topics.
Understanding things like cognitive dissonance, confabulation, false memories, the backfire
effect and just basic psychology made religion’s sticking power far more sensical.
Understanding how I had been duped and we can all be fooled, and talking with Magicians
like Randi, Banachek, Paul Zenon, Matt Dillahunty and other made me far more careful of how
I explore the world and I began rebuilding my worldview from the ground up through a
lens of scientific skepticism.
I started rebuilding my community - reshaping my world view, and finding purpose in life,
but I did it using reason, logic, and evidence.
Early on in this process was a really difficult point in my journey.
And I stayed in the atheist closet for a while but started making videos about the things
I was learning.
I felt so far behind in my science education - an autodidact playing a lifelong game of
catch up, I soaked up everything I could find.
I wasn’t just frustrated over being unintentionally lied too.
I was in love with science, and I wanted to see how far humanity could go.
How far out we could reach into the cosmos?
How effectively could we battle our own extinction?
Could we eliminate drought, hunger, and poverty, and slow down or even end aging?
These were the questions I wanted to explore but kept seeing religion, pseudoscience, and
superstition stagnating the rocket ship of progress.
I didn’t want to be a angry atheist.
I didn’t want to live under a cloud of hate, but I gave a damn.
I started making videos full time, sold almost everything I owned, quit my IT job, took out
a $20,000 business loan, and moved to South East Asia where I could live cheap and stretch
out my funds till Holy Koolaid broke even.
When I came back to the states, I took out my retirement and did the conference circuit.
My car doubled as a bed and a recording studio, Anytime Fitness was my shower, and the coffee
shop was my office.
Holy Koolaid has come a long way since then and has been featured on national Canadian
Radio, Skeptical Inquirer, and most of the big atheist, skeptic, and humanist podcasts,
YouTube channels, and blogs, because this story is clearly resonating.
Many of you have a shared experience here, and I would love to hear your story in the
comments below.
We’re on the cusp of something huge!
But things are still tight, and I’ve only gotten this far because of you.
You guys continue to share my videos, support me on Patreon, and most recently, donated
literally this whole studio!
As well as donations for me to go out and buy a bed.
I’m extremely grateful to all of you and completely humbled.
I don’t have a lot, but I want to give a little something back.
So I made a bunch of these magnetic bumper stickers.
They say: Don’t Drink the Koolaid.
Science is Greater than Dogma.
And I want to give ‘em to you as a Christmas gift.
Go to holykoolaid.com/happyholidays and let me know where I can send them.
Just do it ASAP, because they are limited, and it’s first come first serve till they
run out.
Thank you for your ongoing support.
Thank you guys for your ongoing support.
It really does mean the world to me.
If my story resonates with you, maybe you’ve had a similar journey, and you want atheism
de-stigmatized and you want to see our secular community grow.
Give this thumb a videos up and share it with your friends.
Dare to be curious.
But don’t drink the Koolaid.
Our God is possum-god he faints in heaven above.
Plays dead it’s make-believe love.
Our God is a possum-god.