Hello, friends and fellow skeptics. Welcome to another episode of the Nonprofits. Today's episode, we're going to talk about a popular cartoon and how it portrays parenthood. And Cyndy Plus is going to start us off. So Sundy, what have you got for us? Hi?
So, Yeah, today we're going to start our show with what I only can call a masterpiece. We often talked here about Christian outcry at changing in society, but this article from Jeremy Pryor, an utra conservative writer, brought to our attention by Amman Metta, it brings us to the
living hell conservative people seem to be living in. Jeremy Prior complains about a bit of it carton Bluie, claiming that its depiction of father figure is a symptom of how the West has removed from fatherhood everything mainly about it. These articles are from Blaze Media by Jerry pryor Or October six, twenty twenty four, and the friendly atheist Bioman Medaw on October eighth of the same year.
Let's go Yeah, it seems it seems a little weird that they that they would pick a child's cartoon to go after. And yeah, there's a lot of things I find weird about this, But they always do seem to find things wrong with children shows, don't they. I remember controversies over Barney and about the Teletubbies too, as I recall Big one of over the Teletubbies. As I recall,
so they see Citia shaking her head. So I'm going to go to you first because I see you shaking your head, and I know you had some thoughts about One of the things that Prior talked about was appealing to tradition, and I was hoping you can elaborate and some of the thoughts you had about that.
Well, Kelly, one glaring issue is the fallacy of appealing to tradition. Prior's core argument rests on the belief that traditional roles supposedly ordained by biblical text should be preserved without question. He states, masculinity and femininity are not social constructs but primarily biological concept but our family concepts designed to create a certain dynamic, and that embracing these portrayals will shape our intuition around the essence of these roles.
This is really a classic example of the naturalistic fallacy. Just because something has been historically or biblically upheld does not make it inherently right or beneficial for modern society. Prior also assumes without evidence that traditional gender roles are inherently superior, ignoring the fact that rigid gender roles have often led to horrimble dynamic harmful dynamics within family.
Yeah, definitely, definitely. Now, John, I know that the story reminded you of something. Would you please let the viewers know what it was that it reminded you of.
Yeah, it reminds me of some of the things, like desperate actions that someone trying to hang on to the last vestiges of their privilege and personal mythology that's been challenged by an evolving civilization. They just are lashing out at the rest of the advancing civilization, and since change is scary, they'd rather stick with what they know, And they also want to keep their privileged position in that old society. As other people gain the same sort of
equality within the society and their citizenship. It really makes them feel like they're being left behind, mainly because they are. And conservatism does not want to conserve anything. It wants to regress back to an imagined idyllic past, retreating into roles and patterns of behavior that try to mimic their concept of a non existent romanticized world where men were quote unquote men and women were compliant drones. So that's kind of where I'm going with that.
Yeah, I know that prior talked about the objective ideal of what fatherhood and motherhood are and I and as I was reading that, I was like, well, who's objective? You know, objective view is he talking about? And it and it because even obviously it's it's not an objective view unless we all agree on it, and even if we all agreed on it, we would have to all agree on it, So it would be a subjective view to begin with, because just by all getting together and
agreeing on it. So but the objective and subjectives seem to be really important in Christianity, and and here they're bringing it out even more and I don't know that it's it's uh, I don't know that they realize that there really is no objective fatherhood or motherhood. I mean,
the idea of that to me was really crazy. I know, Cindy, there were a lot of things in this article that made that you made you want to talk about, But what would you say were some of the most important things that that you got out of the article?
Yeah, So, first of all, I want to ask him what part of our biology says that men are supposed to be wearing blue and women pink? Because I don't
see the link between the two. But yeah, anyway, Yeah, there's at least half a dozen things I wanted to talk about after reading this article, the toll, lack of solution afford to his perceived problem, his views on gender, how he believes Abram is the meta Father as he called him, showing a very very selective view of the Bible, or how he based his entire opinion on the show and his will to write an entire article about it on a three minute clips But instead, I wanted to
address the fear that transpires from this article, and Jonathan alluded to it a little bit earlier, And I feel that at its heart, conservatism is fear of being wrong, fear of being new, less in our society, and fear of being irrelevant. And since we are a social creature, we need to we need to feel like we are
part of the group. So as atheists dealing with people who hang strong to their beliefs, we know this feeling too well, because we hear about it every week and we also experience it in other topics in our lives because we are always wrong about something and being wrong hurts in a way. And when people are afraid of being wrong and they're invested so much in their view,
they can react strongly to opposing ideas. And there's the reason why this happens, in my opinion, this proportionately in the US compared to Europe, for example, because in the US people link their own sense of identity to their beliefs,
and we call that identity politics in the US. So when your sense of self is so strongly linked to your beliefs and you attack to your belief or conversation to your beliefs, feels like an attack on your person, on physical attack, And just like a physical attack would trigger defense mechanism like yeah, you know, trying to either avoid or trying to defend yourself contradicting ideas will make those people often dig deeper in their position, and that's
what feeds into the conservative movement. So as people who try to be rational thinkers, I think we need to do a better job at explaining people you are not your beliefs. You can change your beliefs and it won't change you as a person, and that's something we need to express a little bit more in my opinion.
Yeah, that was really insightful. Hannestly, that was great. One of the things that I that got me that really stood out in the article was Prior mentioned that how important symbols were in molding kids' minds, and I thought, well, isn't that what the church? I mean, the church is guiltier than any cartoon or as guilty, and they've been doing it for centuries. You know. It's almost like the
cartoons actually got the idea from the church. So I thought it was really interesting that he would bring it up and be complaining of, oh my godness, these cartoons are using symbols to mold kids minds, you know, And I don't even think for a minute that he even thought about that's exactly what the church was doing, right. So I know that conservatives like Jeremy Prior to author this article are not always doing what they are saying that they're doing what they as opposed to what they're
actually doing. Do you have any thoughts on that, John.
You know what really bothers me about that is that hypocrisy knows no bounds when it comes to a cultural shift. You know, one of the rhetorical techniques that a lot of these people use is blaming their opponents with things that they're doing or being hip critical. But it's not just hypocritical. It's a technique used to distract from their own misdeeds. So even though they are the ones who are indulging in massive indoctrination of children, they're always a
claiming that the other side is doing it. So and not to say that we're both doing it, but to say that only the other side is doing it, and that means that's a dirty trick in dark psychology to try and shift the attention of the focus from your particular point of view, which could be nasty, to the other person's point of view, which if it wasn't nasty, you're going to make it nasty. You know, you're going to say it's what you're doing, which is the nasty stuff.
So it's like, come on, people, stop trying to deceive people, and just if you have an ideology or if you have a way of thinking about something, just be honest about it. And then if you're honest with yourself about it, be honest with everybody. If you can't defend it, maybe you ought to consider changing it. But you know that's
not what they do. They're going to defend it at all costs, and that means being hypocritical, that means lying a lot, you know, that sort of thing, just to maintain your position, which you have too much emotionally invested in it to give it up right at the moment
until you're forced to for some other reason. So that's one of the things that just really irks me about some of these people, you know, their need to preserve their heritage that never really existed in the first place, because it's all an invention of their their own ideas of what history was and what actually happened. All of us are guilty of a little bit of bias, especially historically,
but a lot of us have the facts wrong. But most of us, especially atheists and humanists, when words told our facts are on we say, oh really, oh okay, let me let me read that first, because I'm obviously wrong about many things about this. If I'm starting to if I have, you know, different facts that don't exist, you know, let me go find the other parts of that that I'm not looking at, and well, you know, so we always admit, okay, I didn't know that and
go on from there. Whereas people who are entrenched in their positions, they're not willing to look at any other data because they and they will demonize anybody who does look at any other data because they have too much invested, you know, their identity, but not just their identity, their social standing and a bunch of other stuff are also attached to it, and that makes it dangerous for them to try and change.
That's why it's often hard to talk to tis, at least in my experience, when you attack the religion, they take it personal as if you're attacking them because they think that they are their religion for you. It's kind of difficult sometimes to talk to them. Cynthia, there was something I probably should have brought up first at the very beginning of this segment, and it was about the
name of the cartoon character to begin with, Gluie. It didn't come from the creators trying to be gender neutral, did it now?
And actually himn't. Meta pointed out in his article that blue isn't blue because the creators are trying to push back against like a gender stereotype. Blue is a blue healer, which is a type of Australian herd dog. So this completely deflates Prior's argument, showing that much of his critique is based on over analysis and misplaced assumptions. Listen, I think it's like very interesting how you would hear from the right. There are certain roles that you know, genders
are supposed to play just because tradition dictates right. Girls are supposed to be represented as pink as like he talks about in the article. Boys are supposed to be represented in blue. And there's other things like you know, the pushback against Blue's dad bandit that you know, he's not supposed to show as much affection to his pupps as he does and if you do that then you're not a real man or or whatever that means. I don't I don't understand any of that.
That one kind of urbs me a lot because I was a stay at home husband, so that just blew me away. But I'm sorry to jump in, you know, and and.
To be honest with you, Kelly, as an anecdote, like even though my my mom worked in nine to five, my dad had his own business. So he had his own like school bus company, so and he used to drive for Catholic area schools. So if I was at school, and let's say, for instance, I got sick, or if I had to come home or what have you, guess who I was staying with. My mother did not leave work.
I stayed with my dad, you know. And and I mean like and and I and I could even think of like a lot of different instances growing up where you know, I did a lot of things with my dad, like going out to movies, going to the play part, going to different parts, you know, just different things I
did with my dad. And my dad didn't have a problem like hugging me and kissing me and told me he loved me, I mean, and to be honest, like when he thought I didn't need it as much when I became a teenager, I had to check him real quick and say, listen, I need that from you, sir, Okay, I need all that. Don't. You can't feed me all I love and you're trying to take away. I'm I'm gonna box you.
You know.
And I think that that's even something that I try. I'm serious, Johnny, that's serious. And I think that that's even something that I try to like instill in my child, like that, whether it's your father or whether it's me or or family members, it doesn't matter what you know, gender you are, what you identify, ask you know. We're about love. We're family, and we want to love you. We want to hold you when to keep you safe.
And how that is supposed to be displayed to you doesn't have to be like this aloof thing, like some type of character from a nineteen fifties car nineteen fifty sitcom. That's ridiculous to me. So I think, like you all said it early, that in essence, priors conservativism is just an unwillingness to adapt to modern understandings of fatherhood and an over reliance on rigid patriarchal interpretations of the Bible.
I mean, and and I and from my standpoint, the Bible is not a good book to use two rear children, like God is a terrible character to pattern your parental
ideology after. I mean, there's a there's a shirt that a friend of mine created from another friend that was on a podcast that said Jesus was thrown in the bus so that God could get clout, okay, And and I could just and I just remember like all my Bible lessons back in the day about Jesus in the Garden of Geestsenomy, the night that he was crucified, crying and sweating blood because he knew of the pending torture that he was going to go through to save the world,
which never really saved the world. That's another show. But but you know, if you could just think about like a so called loving father is going to send you to get whipped what how many times with the cant of nine tails, like thirty lashes with the cat of
nine tails. I mean like yeah, they're like right, like like the Cata nine tails is like these like these whips that have like little metal rocks that have hooks in them that like stick you in your your flesh, I mean pricking piercing with a sword now into a cross like that's horrible. But I'm a loving chidn't know, so I need prior to go ahead. Again, as as as we say in my in my culture, have several seats.
If you need it, I'm willing to give you a hug any time.
I appreciate I need that. I need that. John and I will come all the way down to where you are just to get a hooked thank.
You, Sidyah. I know mister Pryor expressed a lot of very conservative ideals in this. Do you think it's fair to judge the children's cartoon by those standards?
No? No, I mean because it's like, listen, children's cartoons are going to be whatever that creator is going to do in order to appeal to a certain demographic of kids, right.
You know, Bluie is basically a harmless cartoon out of Australia, which you know, I know that every time that it comes on, I hear my kid going mom, dad, like you know, bingo, Like he is into that thing, right, And I remember like watching like kids cartoons and kids shows like mister Rogers, and I even remember watching Barney back in the day and all this other stuff, and like I still sing that I Love You songs from
time to time. I mean, like I think that his idea of okay, well, like because I have it in my head that you know, families are supposed to look like this and father's supposed to treat their kids like this, and it's based on this arbitrary standard that was set
a long time ago. That it's not rooted in anything scientific, is just based on whatever type of patriarchal value that you have at that particular time is ridiculous, and I really need for him to allow creators to create the shows that they want to create, which actually Blui's dad is showing healthy, healthy affection towards his pups, just like parents should show healthy affection towards their children.
All Right, Cindy, you brought us into this segment. You want to take us out, and I want to give you the last word.
Yeah, I want to answer your last question with a slightly different take. I think it's fair to judge cartoons in general. They are heavily judged, and that's fine, that's that's that's entirely normal. But I think it's fair to compare, uh, this antiquated view against nothing. I don't think there's anything today that needs to be judged in regards to this this view. You know, Uh, I just realized that I've felt for a very long time that the the the
idea of heaven was extremely childish to me. That's something something that I've said quite often, and it's because it's extremely simple, you know, everyone's happy, everyone's alive. And and you know it's it's it's extremely basic.
And Cindy askat curse, she'll tell you all about heaven in her yeah.
Wins.
Yeah, and and and this, what's the point gender roles coming from the Bible. It's it's the exact same thing. It's extremely basic. It's men do this, women do that because it's easy to explain, easy to understand, easy to remember, easy to enforce. And it's just as relevant today as the principle of heaven is. It's nonsense.
All right, great, and I hey, you know what, there's a lot of great merch over at tiny dot c c slash aca merch. You should go check some of it down.