Joining us is David Silverman, President of American Atheists. www.Atheists.org is the website. Great to talk to you, David.
David Silverman: Thank you for having me on, Dave.
David: So with great interest I've been watching some of your recent appearances, Bill O'Reilly, you were also on I think it was the Fox News, the morning thing that they do over there. I don't know exactly what it is. And a lot of our listeners have been emailing me saying you should take to Dave Silverman. The big question I have is when Bill O'Reilly said you can't explain how the tides work, so therefore, God must exist. I think you really could've come back at him better there. You could've said we know all about the tides, we know about the moon, we know about gravity, but you didn't, and my listeners demand to know why not.
Silverman: OK. Here's the scoop. When you're on a regular television show, let's say you're on the first one that you mentioned, the "Fox and Friends", OK? If I do an eight-minute segment on "Fox and Friends", I usually get three, four minutes of talking. When you're on with Bill O'Reilly, eight minutes turns into one minute of talking. I had to get in sound bites.
Now, Bill, what he tries to do and what many people try to do is they try to control the conversation. If I want to talk about something, he's going to try and derail me and talk about something else. I had seconds to talk on that show, OK? If you listen to the number of times-- number of minutes I had to talk on that show, it's nothing. When he brought up that point, and the same goes for when he brought up the number of atheists, I had the choice of answering that question or bringing the conversation back to what I wanted to talk about. I didn't want to spend any of my time at all talking about lunar gravity. I didn't want to spend any of my time talking about the definition of atheist, are we 1.6% or are we... or does that include agnostics and does that include secular humanists? If we were in a situation where I had more time to talk, I would've done that.
David: What about as an aside say well, we know all about gravity, but... and then boom, right into your next point?
Silverman: You know what? Hindsight is 20/20.
David: Yeah.
Silverman: If I had fed him anything, my fear was that he would've taken me on that path. I didn't want to give him any fuel because any fuel you'll give them, and you have to understand, Bill O'Reilly is not stupid. He is a master at what he does.
David: Definitely.
Silverman: And if you give him fuel, he'll take it. Bill O'Reilly is not stupid, he is not ignorant. He knows exactly what makes the times. But I'm not going to play that game. If he brings me on that show, that's fine, I'm really happy that I'm on that show, but dammit, I'm going to talk about what I want to talk about and I'm not going to let him take me off-subject, and that's exactly why.
David: I've had guests who have done O'Reilly's show give me little snippets of what the atmosphere is like off, you know, off-camera there. What's it like for somebody like you, I mean, we know that your views certainly don't correspond with the on-air narrative at Fox News...
Silverman: Right.
David: But behind the scenes, who knows? Maybe the cameramen are all atheists, I mean, who really knows? What was it like when, you know, before you went on the show or after?
Silverman: OK, well, first of all, I will tell you straight up, there are tons and tons of atheists at Fox News behind the cameras and behind the microphones. And I know this not because I asked them, but because they sneak up and tell me, OK? And at that interview at that time, I was actually doing a couple of different events in New York City, so afterwards I stayed in the green room and hung out for a couple hours, and the atheists just came right out of the woodworks. There are lots and lots of atheists.
Now, as far as what the atmosphere is, you know, when you're off-camera, I need you to understand that, you know, people have made fun of the face that I made when he had the whole tide goes in, tide goes out. This is the scoop: Bill O'Reilly and I sat down at the table for a solid two minutes before the camera started rolling. Now, this is my second time on "The O'Reilly Factor". The first time, they mic'd me up beforehand, they sat me down, cameras rolled, end of the segment, off, and on I went. But this time, I actually had time to talk to the man. He's eloquent. He is knowledgeable. He is polite. He's courteous. He knew about Madalyn Murray O'Hair, he knew about Ron Barrier, the national-- the former national spokesperson of American Atheists, he knew about Annie Laurie Gailer. He had educated questions to ask.
And then the cameras started rolling, and we started duking it out, and we started fighting. And then he comes out with tide goes in, tide goes out, and that look on my face, that puzzled look that everybody likes to talk about, if you watch the tape, that look directly precedes a realization that you can see on-camera that I'm talking to a fictional person. I'm talking to...
David: The on-air persona of Bill O'Reilly.
Silverman: Oh, OK. Well, let's talk about well, maybe Zeus does it. If you're going to pull the argument from ignorance, well, let's use the argument from ignorance to talk about Zeus. And yes, I do know that Thor does not live on Mount Olympus, that Zeus lives on Mount Olympus, and as soon as I said it I knew it was wrong, I knew I was going to get crap about it, so stop giving me crap about it out there.
David: Let me ask you, you mentioned agnosticism, do you consider agnostics part of atheists or not?
Silverman: Yes.
David: You do?
Silverman: Yeah. And atheist is a very broad term, it means you don't have a God. If you don't have a God because you've never learned about a god, you're an atheist. If you don't have a God because you don't think there's any way we could ever know whether there is a god but right now, you don't have a God, you're an atheist. If you don't have a God because you've examined all the evidence and you've read every book from Dawkins and every book from Harrison, every book from Hitchens, and you're 100% sure that there is no god, you're an atheist.
David: I guess I'm not sure I agree with you that if you don't have a specific god in mind, the you are necessarily an atheist, right? I mean, for example, I can imagine a-- like, I don't consider myself an atheist. I think I'm agnostic, but when I say agnostic, I think part of the higher power that created the universe, I think it easily could just be a very... it could just as easily as Jesus, or I don't believe in Jesus anyway, I mean, I was raised Jewish, it could just as easily be a very advanced, you know, a very advanced technology that makes us think that we are in this huge universe and it's all very controlled. That, to me, is just as believable as a man in the sky, probably more believable, to be completely honest.
Silverman: Yeah, probably a lot more believable, when you think about it.
David: But I don't think that that really makes me an atheist, does it? I don't feel like I'm an atheist.
Silverman: Do you have a God?
David: A specific god, or do I believe that a higher power exists?
Silverman: Do you believe in a higher consciousness? I mean, there's different levels of agnosticism.
David: Yeah.
Silverman: And some agnostics you could call a deistic agnostic, but really, when it comes right down to it, do you have a belief in a god? Do you have a belief?
David: I have a belief that there very well could be a higher power more advanced than me. Do I think it is a deity, per se? No, no. I don't think so.
Silverman: Then you're an atheist.
David: Really?
Silverman: Yes.
David: I just don't feel like an atheist. I don't know.
Silverman: That's because...
David: I've been conditioned.
Silverman: You've been conditioned. You have! You've been conditioned to think that an atheist is a very, very small subject, a Grinch-like character who hates everything, who's real angry. But atheism is very, very broad, and for all different kinds of atheists, my kind and your kind.
David: Last thing: did you grow up an atheist? When did you... were your parents atheists? How did this all happen?
Silverman: I could tell... I could spend a lot more than just a few minutes on this. I was raised in a Jewish home. My mother insisted... I was an atheist when I was six. I remember the moment I became an atheist when I was six years old very clearly. Nothing happened to instigate it. I lost God, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus all at the same time. I didn't believe ever.
I went to-- I had my Bar Mitzvah as an atheist. And I stood up in front of my friends and my family during my Bar Mitzvah and I said, "Let us declare the greatness of our God and render honor under the Torah which God gave through Moses as a heritage through the Congregation of Jacob..." I had the whole thing memorized, didn't believe a word of it. My mother knew I didn't believe a word of it, but I didn't get a choice, because I was 13. So I went through the whole Bar Mitzvah, I went through the confirmation process as an atheist, and I asked a whole bunch of questions in Hebrew school, and it never stuck. Interestingly, it wasn't until I was 30 years old and New Jersey State Director of American Atheists that my father came out to me and told me he was an atheist.
David: Incredible.
Silverman: Yeah.
David: Well, that seems like a whole story for another day. David Silverman, President of American Atheists, www.atheists.org.
Silverman: Oh, one more thing, if I could, the convention prices for students have been dropped to $20, including membership. So for $20, a student can come to our national convention and see PZ Myers, Greta Christina, and Christopher Hitchens for 20 bucks. Please spread the word.
David: Hitchens alone is worth the 20 bucks.
Silverman: You betcha.
David: All right, thanks David. We'll talk to you soon.
Silverman: Thanks a bunch, David.
David: All right, and similar to David Silverman, nothing at Hebrew school sticking for Louis either. You got tossed out of Hebrew school, right? Was that what happened?
Louis: No, I just quit.
David: Very good. We'll take a break, we'll be back after this. www.DavidPakman.com.
Announcer: The David Pakman Show at www.DavidPakman.com.
Transcript provided by Alex Wickersham and www.Subscriptorium.com. For transcripts, translations, captions, and subtitles, or for more information, visit www.Subscriptorium.com, or contact Alex at subscriptorium@gmail.com.