This episode mixes live stream tech trouble with real Bible discussion. Chris takes on a chat claim about hell, reads Proverbs 30:3-4, talks with a caller named King about becoming an atheist, and looks at the Ten Commandments in schools and Texas classroom library rules.
Does the Bible’s hell just mean the grave?
A chat commenter claims preachers teach a pagan version of hell, and that the biblical meaning simply refers to the grave. Chris responds that Jesus himself speaks of hell in the Sermon on the Mount. He points to the passage about plucking out an offending eye and asks what that says about the commenter’s claim. The exchange is short, and the stream then moves on to technical problems, but Chris treats the words of Jesus as the direct test of whether hell is only a pagan addition.
Does Proverbs 30:3-4 describe God and Jesus as two separate beings?
While testing his scripture display, Chris puts up Proverbs 30:3-4, which asks who has gone up to heaven and come down, and then asks what his name is and what the name of his son is. Chris says it sounds like two different people, and that the passage seems to treat God and Jesus as two completely separate entities. A viewer named Salty is credited with pointing this out, and Chris adds that the Bible does this often.
Why do people become atheists?
King, a caller, says he officially became an atheist in 2007. It began when Jerry Falwell died and Christopher Hitchens, interviewed by Anderson Cooper, was asked whether the preacher deserved respect and answered “Hell no.” King notes that Hitchens looked unhealthy, but he listened anyway. He was raised in a light version of Christianity, going to church two or three times a year, more for funerals or weddings, and saying “Praise Jesus” when something went wrong.
What do Christians leave out when they want the Ten Commandments in schools?
Chris argues that Christians pushing the Bible into schools tend to ignore the horrific parts of scripture and point to the Ten Commandments while leaving out the harsher lines. He quotes the second commandment about worshipping no other gods, along with the warning about punishing the children to the third and fourth generations, and notes that this part is usually missing from the classroom version. He also shows Exodus 20:7 on screen and points viewers to Theocracy Watch, which tracks Christians forcing beliefs on others.
What are the Texas classroom library cataloging rules about?
Chris reads a post about Conroe ISD in Texas, where teachers must catalog classroom libraries to comply with state book rules. The board president reportedly said volunteers will do the work, and the post asks who coordinates, trains and checks them, and who is responsible if it is unfinished. It argues Texas requires compliance but not entry of every classroom book into the main catalog, that one classroom can hold hundreds of books, and that parents are not an unpaid state workforce. Chris adds his frustration that money goes to the wealthy.
Full transcript
Transcript of the live stream, lightly edited for readability. Click a section time to jump to that part of the video.
Women’s Divorce Rights, Jesus and Hell Debate
Chris opens by arguing that no-fault divorce reduced suicide among women, since it let them escape abusive marriages that society had pressed them to stay in. He jokes about his caffeine intake and his lack of sleep, then gives shout-outs to a few viewers he calls ignorant, admitting he mispronounces their names on purpose. A parody ad for Father Flanigan’s post-mortem baptismal kits then plays.
[Commercial break]
Chris returns with a greeting and apologises for technical trouble, explaining that he is rebuilding the show and testing a call-in feature. He tries to get a caller on the line and checks that his soundboard, music, and map display are working. A viewer asks about the problem with the New Testament, and Chris notes that the chat is hard to read on his screen.
The discussion then turns to hell. A chat commenter claims preachers teach a pagan version of hell rather than the biblical meaning, which refers to the grave. Chris responds that Jesus himself speaks of hell in the Sermon on the Mount, pointing to the passage about plucking out an offending eye, and asks what that says about the commenter’s claim. He then mentions a chatbot now built into the Damn Show and Father Flanigan websites and starts sharing his display with viewers.
Part 2
Stream Setup, Moderators, AI, and Sponsorship Plans
Oh, son of a [ __ ]. Don’t do that. I just went and [ __ ] it up. With the callers, they go to this web page right here and put in their information, and it’s pretty cool. Instead of going to this video ninja and stuff, it works well. Anyway, I don’t know if I can show you this, so let me get that out of the way. Part of our sharing stops working, and now the display is off.
Let me show you the new studio I’m building. This is what I’ve built so far. You can see the studio stuff over here, where our people pop in. If we had a caller, they would be down here, but you can’t see it, of course. There we go, we did it. Let’s close that again and go to the display. As long as I leave it right there, you can see it, I guess. Nope. Anyway, it’s really cool stuff. If it ever fully works, I’ll get there, but it’s really complicated, and I’ve just been building the [ __ ] out of it. Parts of it work, and that’s pretty cool, but why isn’t my damn chat working? I at least need to be able to see my peeps.
My friends, I appreciate you, and I want to torture you with everybody else, so when I run the stream, I’ll probably just keep working on it. I’ll leave the stream on, and we’ll just keep going. I’ve got to get this [ __ ] figured out first, because this is just the underlying basics. Each show is going to have its own skins, logos, images, and so on, but I have to get all the basic underlying parts worked out first. I appreciate your patience. To those of you who aren’t patient, you can [ __ ] off, and I mean that out of love.
Last time you were in a stream, you seemed very burnt out and a bit angry, and you seem happier and more chill now. I’m happy for you. Thank you, Rainbow. Well, it kind of comes and goes. You do get burned out. I was watching Async’s channel, and she’s getting people to help her with stuff for the same reason. It just gets old doing this [ __ ] every day, over and over again. Part of it is that I’m in a better frame of mind now, but that’s only because I’m OCD about working on something. I’m building something, and it’s driving me crazy. When I’m done, though, it’s going to be really cool, but you probably won’t see me much anymore.
Ideally, if I get it working right, we’ll have a morning show that’s more like a traditional morning show. It’ll be more fun, with different things like news, games, and stuff like that, with different hosts. I won’t be there for most of it. We’ll have other shows throughout the day and weekly shows too, but I won’t be on those either. If I get the production side set up right, I won’t have to be there for them. Even today, when I take a break on the weekends, I still have to sit here, run the weekend replay, and argue with the [ __ ] in the chat. You know which [ __ ] I’m talking about. It’s nice to get a break.
One thing I’ve learned is who’s on my side and who isn’t. We also had a big moderator problem for a while, and that was my fault. I fixed it as best I could. Now we’re getting some moderators together again, and people are moderating again, so it’s coming together. Because of all the tech problems I’ve had on the show, part of it was laziness. I didn’t want to fix it, and I didn’t want to do anything, so things just kept breaking. Then I decided I was going to fix the [ __ ] out of it, so I started fixing [ __ ], and it just seems to keep breaking more. I think the Christians are out there with a prayer circle every morning, praying against my show.
Good morning, Laura, and thank you for joining us every day. Hello, Brennan, how are you doing? Ricardo Riley, how are you doing? I hope everything’s going well in your world. Yeah, it has been a while. In the first couple of months of the show, we had Miss Ryan on, but this year I started taking calls, and Ryan just sat back there, the poor soul, for two hours a day, waiting for me to stop yelling at these people. So I said, sorry, and I stopped having Ryan on the show. That’s a horrible way to put it, but that’s how it was. She was wonderful, and we had no problems between us. It’s just that I was talking the whole time, so she didn’t have anything to do, because I was doing all the talking. Same thing with Kelly Laughlin.
When we take calls, I don’t like it, because it’s the same thing every day, over and over again. It can’t be good for the blood pressure. You deal with these people, and they come on and say, “I’m going to say something racist, misogynistic, and stupid.” Whenever you get emotional, I’ll say, “Wait, wait, wait, let’s not get emotional. You’re getting emotional.” Well, [ __ ] yeah, I’m getting emotional, you [ __ ]. It happens. I don’t yell at my own mods anymore, though. I try not to do that.
What absolutely everyone does nowadays is use ChatGPT. What the hell is nobody thinking about anymore? There’s a lot going on with AI, and I’m a mixed bag on it. I love it. I can do things I never could have done before. I can make things and nerd out in ways I never could have. It’s like having a programmer friend right there saying, “Hey, man, how do I do this on this web page?” But it’s also stupid. If you’ve worked with AI, you know that. It’ll do something and then put underneath it, “Oh my god, don’t do that, you’ll destroy everything.” Then it’s like, “Oh, wait, wait, [ __ ].” On top of that, we see a lot on the internet about how the big AI people, the billionaires, are warning us that the chatbots are thinking on their own, so we have to be careful. If they’re trying to scare us away from using it, that makes me pause and wonder why.
Most of mine, though, I do in-house. I use Claude for the big stuff, but I have local LLMs that do things down on that computer. I have a vision model here, and I do all my own stuff. If you go to thedamshow.com, fatherflanigans.com, or notmputers.com, because I’m firing that back up, by the way, and nobody cares about that, you’ll find a chatbot. For Father Flanigans, I now have a chatbot you can talk to, and if you do, you’re talking to Odin, the computer right underneath me. You should wear a blood pressure cuff hooked up to a gauge on the screen so we could watch it go up, and you could lay bets on when I’d grab my chest and keel over during a show. There’s fun for the whole family.
I was telling the AI, we were arguing, and I said, “Listen, stop [ __ ] with the stream stuff. I don’t care about the stream part. It works. We haven’t had any problems with it. Let’s move on to making other [ __ ] that doesn’t work, so I can waste the rest of my [ __ ] day.” And we did, and the stream stuff turned out not to work. That’s the fun of it. With any luck, though, I want to get it to where we have sponsorships for The Daily Atheist Morning Show, real coffee companies sponsoring us. We have the Theocracy Watch newsletter, the Millstone newsletter that comes out weekly, DailyAtheistMorningShow.com, Father Flanigans, and multiple channels and shows coming out. I’d like to see if we can find a real sponsor, and that’s one of my other projects. The nice thing about AI is that I can pop in and say, “Help me build this proposal for a coffee company,” and it can explain all the stuff we have. There’s so much I’ve been building lately, and it’s complicated, with loose ends everywhere. My brain is about to explode.
Why do we call it Saturday if Saturn isn’t real? Oh, that’s a good question. [ __ ] Saturday, damn it. I’ve always wondered that. I’m going to go drain the main vein because I have to do the thing at the place with the stuff connected. All right, we’re going to run a commercial, and I want to get something. Give me a little bit of time, because we’re working here. We’ve already seen that one, and we saw Soul Swords. Okay, let’s do this.
[Commercial break]
Our chat should start working again any moment. Let’s go here, and then we’ll go. Cool. Hopefully our chat will come back. There’s our chat again. The sound should be back too, so we’ll pop up our little chat sounds, and hopefully I can hear them. There we go. Garland says, “I can only speak English.” Me too. I’ve tried to study other languages, but I just can’t. I was not gifted with the ability for language. Despite how I sometimes sound, I have a very good grasp of English, but I would really like to translate it into another language.
Testing the Stream and a Caller’s Atheist Story
I can’t tell if my sound is working. It seems to blink in and out, so maybe it’s not. We’ll see. I was trying to learn French and Spanish, and I can speak a little of both, but not enough to get me out of a fire. Let me test a few things while we hang out and wait. Beard of Empathy, if you want to come up and hang out and test stuff, please do.
Let’s see if my favorite scriptures work. I’ll put up Exodus 20:7, and it pops up right there: “You shall not take the name of the Lord God.” That’s awesome, and it works. Whenever I want to show people scripture, it shows up on the vertical. Are any of you watching the vertical stream? There’s one built into the regular stream and a separate one, and I haven’t been able to get the separate one working today.
Next I tried Proverbs 30:3-4, which reads, “I have not learned wisdom, nor have I attained the knowledge of the Holy One. Who has gone up to heaven and come down? Whose hands have gathered up the wind? Who has wrapped up the waters in a cloak? Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is the name of his son? Surely you know.” It sounds like they’re talking about two different people, doesn’t it? They’re talking about God and Jesus as two completely separate entities. It does that so often, doesn’t it, Salty? That’s fascinating, and I appreciate you pointing it out for me.
I want to make the web page work a little better, so I copied it over and pasted it in. It looks really good, and I can make it big. I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree, but it’s working. Before long, we’re going to have a real show on this channel, but I don’t think a caller will go well technically. I try to do this without people here and it doesn’t work. Still, we have a caller now, so hello, King. It’s nice to have you with us.
King, how long have you been an atheist? I think officially it was 2007. It really started when Jerry Falwell died and Christopher Hitchens did an interview with Anderson Cooper. They asked whether we should give this preacher some respect, and Hitchens said, “Hell no.” I remember watching him, and he was later in his life and probably drunk, and he did not look healthy. But I listened to him, and that was in 2007. Before that, I was raised a Christian, but a light one. We went to church two or three times a year, and more if somebody died or got married. If something went wrong, we’d say, “Praise Jesus,” but most of the time we didn’t.
Here’s our website, which is called The DAM Show. On it is the Theocracy Watch, where you can see how Christians force their beliefs on other people throughout our country. That’s why I do what I do. This is just one example, where religion is forced on women through abortion restrictions, and there are book bans in schools. Let me see if I can find something else. I’ve got another one if I can make it happen, and I’m testing sound and everything else as we go.
Linux is giving me trouble again, and I’ll say it plainly: I hate Linux. All I want is to open a program, and I can’t do it. Facebook keeps telling me I’ve logged in from another device, and I’m surprised it lets me log in at all. Some viewers have popped up, including Billy Fivehead, Nani Garland, and Flocky, and Ry is here too. Ry’s not a robot, he’s a real man. People who claim gender is only male or female also treat manhood as a spectrum, where one man is more manly than another. That’s cute, isn’t it? Let’s see whether Chrome is here, because there’s no Chrome right now.
Texas Book Cataloging, Ten Commandments, and Stream Wrap-Up
The stream opens with Chris struggling to get his screen share working. He tries a browser window, then the desktop, and complains that the test keeps failing before he can show anything to viewers. He jokes that the only browser available is Firefox, and says the problems were the things he could not test before going live.
Once the share works, Chris reads aloud a post about Conroe ISD in Texas. Teachers have raised concerns about having to catalog their classroom libraries just to comply with Texas book regulations. The board president has reportedly said teachers won’t have to do the work because volunteers will handle it. The post asks who is coordinating those volunteers, who is training them, who is checking that every book is scanned correctly, and who is responsible when the work is not finished.
The post argues that Texas requires districts to comply with classroom library rules but does not require every classroom book to be entered into the school’s main catalog. A single classroom can hold hundreds of books, so the workload is substantial. It concludes that parents are not an unpaid administrative workforce for the state, and that if the state creates a compliance requirement, it should fund the people, technology, and time needed to meet it. Chris adds his own frustration that money keeps going to the wealthy instead of to these needs.
Chris then turns to the Bible and the Christian push to put it in schools. He says Christians tend to ignore the horrific parts of scripture and point to the Ten Commandments while leaving out the harsher lines. He quotes the second commandment, about worshipping no other gods, and the warning about punishing the children to the third and fourth generations, noting that this part is usually left out of the classroom version.
To close, Chris says he is going to wrap up the stream early so he can finish testing his setup. He hopes to host another broadcast at 9:00 Eastern tonight, and if that fails, the chat will continue on the YouTube channel as usual. He thanks viewers for their patience, says the setup is getting closer to working, and signs off.
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