Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that makes do with what it can find. I'm your host this week, Aaron, and with me is Steve! I'm Steve, and I’m what you have to deal with this week since Shea is still unwell and well, I’m available. Also, I was reminded today why I don’t get beer drunk anymore. This Week’s Beer This week’s beer is… whatever we’ve got on hand cause it’s another remote record! Round Table You might have noticed this is a remote record again, and that the yeti is, as is his cryptid way, missing. Aaaaand that’s because the rona got him. Not to worry, he does seem to be doing as well as one can with a breakthrough case. If all goes well, he’ll be back in a few weeks. We have a correct of sorts from friend-of-the-show Kevin who says that “the Toronto Maple Leafs are the arch-enemy of the Montreal Canadians” so that’s something, apparently, they’re called the Montreal Canadians… makes me wonder how the rest of Canada feels about that but ok. Concluding with, what I assume to be the battle-cry of the correct team, “Go Habs Go!” Headlines HL1: Science Says It’s Not The Science. Our first headline comes from Hemant Mehta, The Friendly Atheist, whose reporting on secular issues has provided this, and several other secular podcasts, headlines for years. Make sure you visit his new blog on OnlySky — as it, only sky up above. Music! — where he writes about religious issues, well, issues with religion, now with 1000% fewer sewer ads. Because Pathos has long been a dumpster fire of terrible. Anyway, despite the fervent argumentation of American Evangelicals, it’s not exposure to science that leads kids away from religion. I’d go so far as to say it’s all the bigotry and rape, but according to Sociology of Religion by Professor John H. Evans of the University of California, San Diego, it’s exactly what we always thought it was: teaching kids how to ask good questions and encouraging them to ask those questions of people who don’t want to answer them — like priests. From his paper… long quote: The traditional literature on the secularizing effect of the natural sciences assumes that any religious belief is incompatible with science, and therefore all science will be secularizing for all religious students… I find no effect of the distinction between science and non-science disciplines for religious students in general or conservative Protestants in particular. On the other hand, pure fields lead to more secularization than do applied fields, particularly for white conservative Protestants. This suggests that when science, social science or the humanities secularizes, it is the result of inquiry itself, not the content of that inquiry. This new way of looking at the impact of science explains the typical outlier in such studies — engineering — a field that has many of the trappings of physics, but with a much more religious constituency. So basically, it's not that becoming scientifically literate necessarily pushes religion out of your life — though if you’re honest about the scientific process it should — rather it’s teaching kids how to ask questions, evaluate the information they get back in an intellectually honest way, and support their conclusions with vetted information. Basically, once you’ve taught people how to think, it’s a lot harder to sell them on the idea of letting your cabal of tax-free zealots do their thinking for them.