The Mikhailian-Inception Podcast With Mikey Liao - Ep. 1 [Citizen Journalism of the Christian Kind]
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the McCallion Inception Podcast has been brought to you by Quil May Mikey Leo To all my listeners out there. A good morning. Good afternoon and good evening to you all. Thank you for tuning in. This new podcast is part of the McCallion Siri's I have created. The 1st 1 is the McCallion Rider, where I have recorded discussions with my right your customers. The McCallion inception also contains a similar concept of the 1st 1 However, this podcast resides outside of my car and into an actual discussion table. This is where I will invite guests onto the show to have a conversation on almost anything. In some cases, the content will contain controversial subject matters, depending on where the discussions go and who comes onto the program. ****, I'm not even a stranger to controversy. So go figure. This show is an exploration of our human evolution. How far we have come politically, morally, spiritually, and in terms of the food we eat. Hence the multiple topics being covered here. You will hear my guests and I come to a common ground over a certain issue, or you will hear us disagree on this podcast. But this is not about winning or losing a debate or who's smarter and who's stupid. Frankly, I'm not the smartest guy out there as I am constantly learning new things. This is about sharing multifaceted ideas that will hopefully make us better people for the future. From time to time. I will also come on by myself to share opinion pieces I had written to comment on the current state of religion, atheism, politics, science, psychology, philosophy and even, perhaps a whole lot of nonsense I subscribe to now. I'm not an expert with a PhD in the subject, So if I say something stupid, please do not land base me, just be patient and let me down gently. I am just a human being with unimaginable flaws. But even if I am not an expert, that does not mean I do not have an opinion on these matters. So now that we have this settled, let's move in its episode one, shall we, In this episode of the McCallion inception, I actually wanted to be honest about something Now. I've been a person of faith for about nine years, subscribing to a form of Protestant American evangelicals, Um, even though I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This form of evangelicalism is constantly crossing the border and influencing the way we think as a church Onley recently that I decided to leave the evangelical movement for good. No, I did not become an atheist, although I've had times where I almost bordered on atheism. I left evangelical ism for multiple reasons. But before I go on, I want to make this clear that this is not a bashing of the Christian religion. If you think that your faith is helping you spiritually, morally, or to connect with God in some way, it is not my intention or place to take that away from you. This is simply based on my own experience and observation. However, my hope is that in this episode it will help those who are in the church system to think critically about what it is they believe, and about their own actions, which flow from such beliefs. If God calls us to love him with our minds, then clearly I'm sure it is okay for us to ask hard questions. Now, one episode is not enough to cover some of the controversies in the evangelical church, so I will cover one of the issues in this episode, while the rest will be dealt with in upcoming contests. It may even come up in the discussions I have with my guests in the near future. So why did I leave? Well, here's reason. Number one, Intellectual dishonesty. What do I mean by this? It is what I call citizen journalism of the Christian kind. This is the title of the piece I had written recently, and I want to share this with all of my listeners to see if you can relate to this experience. It goes something like this. On April 15th 2000 and 13 the world clinched its heart and terror as news outlets and social media reported the scene from Boston, Massachusetts. Radical Islamic terrorists Zo Car Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev made two pressure cooker bombs to attack the Boston Marathon. At least 246 people were injured, while three succumbed to their injuries. It was a bloody day for Boston, But if I may be so blunt, it was a bloody day for journalism as well as we watched on television the horror of what just transpired, one could not escape the pathetic attempts of journalists trying to find any lead on the criminals who are yet to be apprehended. I remember a scene of CNN's Anderson Cooper talking to the live cameras while two other journalists next to him we're checking their phones and social media to find any clues on the terrorists. This led to Ms identifying the perpetrators as brown skin males. When the real criminals were light skin Chechens, there were constant blunders in their reporting, to the point where one must ask, Do you have any standards at all? Because there doesn't seem to be any. In the age of social media, everyone and anyone can act as a journalist with the mass proliferation of smartphones, computers and or ipads. Any Twitter user can post faulty information online, and anyone can fall for it. Hook, line and sinker. Even the legitimately trained journalists are falling for the stuff because every news organization wants to be quote unquote first in reporting breaking news. Truth has been replaced by ratings. Sensationalism has replaced sense. We're so fixated on chasing a thrill on TV or online that we can no longer tell the difference between entertainment and real news, It's a sad prospect we face as human beings. Media companies know how to play on our insecurities and anger. It is, as Maryland Manson once described in the film Bowling for Columbine, Fear and Consumption. The more you fear, the more you buy into this illusory idea that you can't be happy without X wires said. If you don't have axe body spray, that girl over there is not going to sleep with you. If you don't have a Rolex, then you're not cool enough. And if you don't have a girlfriend by a certain age, you're a loser. Seriously, who determined these things, and why do they have any value? Since when did happiness become conditional on what you have or don't have? And yet we buy into this idea as if these ideas are true. Are common sense has now been thrown out of the window for the sake of temporary pleasures that don't really matter at the end of the day? Now a part of me wants to say that Christians are immune to this type of phenomena because of how Jesus calls us to abandon the foolishness of this world. But I'm afraid I cannot say that with such confidence as I had before, many Christians have been engaging in this type of sensationalism for years within the evangelical church. And there are several reasons why this is the case number one s scatology, which is the study of end times prophecy and how that colors the way we view reality number two confirmation or cognitive bias. Looking for something to justify your presuppositions number three. The total lack of responsibility in fact, checking sensationalized news stories. And finally, number four demonization. When something you hear does not fit your worldview, you say it is from Satan. This is the most dismissive form of cognitive bias in action. I cannot tell you how many times I've seen this manifestation in the church as an aspiring journalist, and it frustrates me. It first freaks me because as much as Christians may criticize the mainstream media for so called liberal bias, I cannot help but note the irony in that statement. One thing I had to understand in my researches, the psychological relationship between media and viewership. That relationship is crucial to this discussion, because the accusation of bias has much to do with our human psychology as viewers and as people working in the media industry as much as conservative Christians can accuse certain media outlets of being biased against them. The question, I must ask is, So what media are you watching, then? Obviously it would be a media outlet that fits their worldview, their fears and their sensationalism. And the same goes for the other side. Whether a person is a liberal, conservative, Christian, atheist or some strange animal in between, the labels do not matter. As much as this is a human psychological problem, we commit this ironic sin of using media to criticize media, and we inevitably shoot ourselves in the foot one exercises bias by calling the other biased. We like to hear what fits our bill. We compare ourselves by ourselves, and we think we are the fair and balance ones because our Echo chambers says so media and viewership co exist because one cannot exist without the other. Without viewers, media would cease to exist as it is the audience who helps give ad revenue to these companies. We can blame the media all we want on Lee to be not self aware of the fact that we're engaging in the same type of sensationalism they are. In other words, we're just as responsible. When the former mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, was under fire for smoking crack cocaine in 2013 Ford was very good at playing to his base by blaming the liberal media for making him look like a buffoon. To be honest, I don't think the media needed to try it all because on one fateful Toronto day on live television, Fort said this to the media cameras quote. Oh, and the last thing was Olivia gone deck. It says that I wanted to eat her *****. Olivia gone deck. I have never said that in my life. To her, I would never do that. I'm happily married. I've got more than enough to eat at home. If I remember correctly, I think I almost fell out of my chair, dying of laughter. Was it the media that made Rob Ford look that, or did he make himself look bad in front of the media? Did the media put a gun to his head to make such a deranged statement? Absolutely not. He made that statement himself out of his own volition. That's the psychology at work. We can often blame the mainstream media for not catering to our side of a particular issue. But why should they since we are already doing a good job of making a buffoonery out of ourselves? All they did was roll the cameras, and we were the ones that said Action. Clicking the Clapper board. I can never forget the time when a sister in church was telling us that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had legalized Beastie ality. I had another Christian show me an article trying to prove that Canadians can now have sex with an animal. Legally, this is where all the scatology talk happens in church. Christians start panicking about the sliding morale in this country and that Jesus is coming back soon. But after doing much fact checking on my end, I realized that the story is not a sensationalized, as some evangelical Christians had made it out to be. The reason the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the former law was because the earlier code had loopholes on what constituted as acts of easy ality. Going back to the 19 fifties. The law only included the active penetration but was not broad enough to include other sexual acts with an animal. So with the old law struck down, it looks as if it had been decriminalized. But nothing can be further from the truth. The government is attempting to formulate a bill which broadens the definition of Beastie Ality in the criminal code. This is in response to a British Columbian man who tried to use a dog to engage sexually with a stepdaughter. But because no penetration was involved, the man was acquitted of the Beastie Ality charge. This is what happens when we hold onto our cognitive biases so much that we, as Christians, not the media, will sacrifice truth for the sake of protecting our religious beliefs. It's one thing to say that something is true and then demonstrating that claim to be true. It's another thing to simply want something to be true and doing whatever it takes to justify are firmly held beliefs on the matter. The root of journalism and science is doubt, scepticism and following the evidence wherever it leads, not jumping to the conclusion first and then finding information to confirm our preconceived notions. The sad part is that even if you do show certain Christians evidence that they did not get their fax rates. They will resort to saying that the media is controlled by the devil and therefore should not be listened to. That is a sort of demonization I was talking about earlier. Once the other side is perceived as the delusional one, we consider the information not worth listening to, which in the end, actually furthers our ignorance. It is a dismissive act, which says ignorance is bless, sometimes fax challenge the quote unquote infallibility of one's beliefs. And it can be painful. Toe one psychology. The reason is we have missed our sense of identity by latching it onto an ideology. Our egos feel that our identities hang in the balance when were proven wrong about something. Now, granted, there is definitely sensationalism in the media that needs to be scrutinized. But I wouldn't go as far as to call the mainstream media a safe haven for Satan. What I can do is be responsible on my end to sift through the sensationalism and bias that the media puts out and find the truth. Certainly there is a slant towards any political ideology in the media, but there is also a bias to truth. Truth is objective, and it stands regardless of where we stand. Are we as Christians willing to do the hard work of filtering through the data to uncover the truth? Jesus was all about truth, for he claims to be the truth. As it says in John 14 6 If we're posting things without verifying the authenticity of the data, then are we not directly or indirectly lying for the one who is the truth? Are we not dishonoring him by going against his very character? It is a worthy consideration, as bearing false witness against one's neighbor should not be taken lightly. If God calls us to truth, and no matter how inconvenient it is to our own biases, the truth will inevitably set us free from ignorance and the anti intellectualism that comes along with it. No longer will we resort to the mental gymnastics needed to defend our faith. We can confidently accept Christ without discounting the reality we live in with humility and as an unwieldy mystery. And that is the end of my piece. If you liked it, or if you disagree, you can comments below on my Facebook page, or on my soundcloud page at Mikey Leo, which is m i k e Y l A Oh, without caps without space without underscores my ultimate hope in what has been said here will open our minds to a better future and will further our human evolution. Thank you to all my listeners once again for listening to the McCallion Inception. Podcast. My name is Mikey Leo, and I hope to see you soon. Bye for now.